INFLUENZA AT ALASKA.

Northern Advocate, 18 August 1919, Page 4

INFLUENZA AT ALASKA.

NINETY-FIVE PER CENT DEAD

ESQUIMAUX WIPED OUT,

Confirmation of reports that th p native Esquimaux population of Bristol Bay, Alaska, virtually was wiped out by an epidemic of influenza has just been brought to San Francisco by the arrival of the U.S. cruiser MarMehead from a relief expedition to the north.

The Marblehoad recently hurried at top speed from the Bay of San Francisco carrying a score of San Francisco volunteer doctors and male and female nurses in an effort to save the stricken Esquimaux, who had sent out a cry for help in their distressful condition.

According to Lieut. W. R. Leahy, senior medical officer of the expedition, 95 per cent of a population of more than 900 persons had died by the time the expedition reached Bristol Bay. Only approximately fifty of the influenza sufferers were alive when relief arrived, Lieut. Leahy said and half t&at number were saved.

CHILDREN IMMUNE.

He described finding babies and young children lying among the -himdreds of dead, weak and helpless from starvation. The mortality, he said, almost was entirely confined to adults, the children evidently being immune to the influenza. Lieut. Leahy said the disease was a modified form of Spanish influenza, but that the natives appeared to have no powers of resistance, He attributed this to other diseases prevalent among the population and the squalid conditions under which the natives lived. CANADA AND U.S.A. FREE. Influenza has practically disappeared in Canada and the United States, but the medical practitioneds are still discussing the dread disease, and in an address in New York before-.the convention of the Allied Medical Association of America Dr. Charles H. Duncan, one of the founders of the volunteer hospital, described his unique method of combating the disease by means of immunising the patient to his own person, whereby influenfca and pneumonia were no more to be fearefd "than a boil on the back of the neck!" , AN ALLEGED REMEDY, Upon 246 patients ill with pneumonia and influenza last winter, Dr. Duncan said, he had used the treatment, "without a single fatality or any complications." "Briefly," said the physician, "I take one drachm of mucous from the infected area and pacteurise it on one -ounce of tillered water, where it remains several hours. One cubic centimetre of this toxine injected subcutaneously will effect a spontaneous cure of Spanish influenza, pneumonia, catanh or any similar localised infection. It will stop any cough, outsido of tuberculosis, inside of 24 hours. Dr. G. F .Laidlaw, professor of the history of medicine and diagnosis at Flower Hospital, in discussing the method, said that the discoverer, had "solved' a problem that has 'been germinating in medicine for 2000 years."