Pitcairn-Chicago link for speedy health advice

Press, 23 September 1987, Page 7

Pitcairn-Chicago link for speedy health advice

NZPA-Reuter Chicago The next time one of the descendants of Fletcher Christian’s band of mutineers on Pitcairn Island comes down with appendicitis, help will be just a 96,000 km telephone call away. Space-age medical care will come to the tiny speck of land 5800 km east of New Zealand this year in the form of a satellite link to a hospital emergency room in Chicago. Doctors at Resurrection Hospital say they will be able to offer basic medical advice to the island’s lone nurse, and may be able to read X-rays and electro-cardiograms and monitor the vital signs of ailing islanders. For Kart Young, the Norwegian-born wife of the Pitcairn Magistrate, Mr Brian Young, the lifeline will make it easier to relax on the island, where most of the 47 permanent residents are direct descendants of the mutineers on the Bounty. An Oslo native and author of “The Last Mutineer,” a best-seller in Norway, Mrs Young recently visited the Chicago hospital, where she said

that the islanders have sometimes suffered from insufficient medical advice. Two islanders in recent years were sent to New Zealand for treatment for what was, incorrectly, thought to be appendicitis, she said. A young girl who fell in a cistern and was thought drowned probably would have been left for dead if two physicians hadn’t been visiting the island at the time, she added. Until now .Pitcairn, Britain’s last colony in the South Pacific, had no permanent arrangement with an outside medical facility. When the link is complete, doctors at Resurrection should be able to monitor a patient through telemetry just as they do an accident victim in Chicago when paramedics are sent to assist. The islanders today, 13 of them children, make a living carving curios for souvenirs and selling stamps to the outside world. Most of their ancestors were the mutineers who seized the Bounty in 1789 and sailed to the I.skm island with a handful of

Tahitians after casting Captain William Bligh and 18 officers adrift The mutineers remained undetected until 1808, largely because charts of the day misplaced the island by 320 km. Christian and other Bounty crewmen were killed during a period of internecine strife but the island later prospered under the leadership of the sole surviving male adult, John Adams. The Chicago hospital became involved with the care of the Bounty descendants through the interest of David Miller, an N.B.C. engineer, whose long-time amateur radio hobby has been keeping in touch with Pitcairn. Mr Miller arranged for the installation of a telephone dialler on Pitcairn that will allow a 96,000 km transmission path via the United States Government’s ATS 3 satellite and a patch line out of Malabar, Florida, to the hospital. Peace Sat and the National Air and Space Administration (N.A.S.A.) approved the link, and the islanders will not be

charged for calls to the hospital. The island nurse, posted to Pitcairn on twoyear rotations, runs a dispensary and will make the calls to Chicago as needed. Mrs Young, whose husband is a descendant of the Bounty midshipman, Edward Young, said there has been “a decline in social life now on Pitcairn because we are all so busy making curios.” A few residents are now attending university in New Zealand, she said; but “there’s not much use in coming back to Pitcairn to weave baskets if you have a degree.” Given the demographics,’ she added: “It might be difficult to keep the next generation going.” Nor, she said, are the islanders necessarily healthy in spite of a diet heavy in fish, fruit and vegetables. “Most of the older generation are extremely fat,” she said. “They fry the fish they eat and drink too much coconut milk. They even boil their potatoes in coconut milk,” which has a high fat and oil content.