Balto, a hardy Siberian husky, led the trip's final leg
with his musher, Gunnar Kaasen, and their team of dogs They entered Nome just
before daybreak on February 2, 1925. He was considered the hero, however, he was only the last relay. The true unsung hero was a once sickly pup named Togo--see below.
Many people living today do not know the scourge of
Diphtheria. They don't know that young children choked to death. They don't
know that many families lost 3 or 4 children, sometimes all of them. They don't know how the medical
people worked diligently to create a vaccine to prevent the deadly disease,along with a serum to heal the already ill. Neither do they know of the valiant dogs that carried the serum 700 miles across Alaska to heal a village ravaged by by Diphtheria.
The scourge of Diphtheria happened before my time, but I
remember an impactful black and white film that featured Diphtheria and its
horrible ravages, and how Science turned it around. So, I tried to find the movie
and found instead, Togo, the hero dog that delivered 300,000 units of
antitoxin to Nome, Alaska. (With William Dafoe as Leonhard Seppala, Togo's musher.)
Diphtheria is highly contagious, lethal, and mysterious.
When medical experts developed treatments and vaccines, the affliction
virtually disappeared—but not entirely.
See Science,| October
2021
How Science Conquered Diphtheria, the
Plague Among Children
By Perri Klass
Klass, a pediatrician, is the author of A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public
Health Gave Children a Future.
She writes, "Even Noah Webster, that master of words, did not
have a name for the terrible sickness. "In May 1735," he wrote in A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases, "in a wet, cold season, appeared at Kingston,
an inland town in New-Hampshire, situated in a low plain, a disease among
children, commonly called the 'throat distemper,' of a most malignant kind, and
by far the most fatal ever known in this country." Webster noted the
symptoms, including general weakness and a swollen neck. The disease moved
through the colonies, he wrote, "and gradually traveled southward, almost
stripping the country of children....It was literally the plague among
children. Many families lost three and four children—many lost all." And
children who survived generally went on to die young, he wrote from his vantage
point of more than half a century later. The "throat distemper" had
somehow weakened their bodies."
In a Canadian journal article from 1927, a doctor
recalled the years before the antitoxin was available when he'd had to watch a
"beautiful girl of five or six years" choke to death. Later, the
doctor's own daughter came down with Diphtheria, but a decade had passed, and
now the antitoxin was available. "To watch the choking dreadful membrane
melt away and disappear in a few hours with complete restoration to health
within a few days," he wrote, "was one of the most dramatic and
thrilling experiences of my professional career."
The waters are muddy these days. There is a political war,
a distrust in information, false information, propaganda, and greed on the part
of those who can benefit from our present pandemic.
I ran across this article about Diphtheria from Science
and am mentioning it because I believe there are many people alive today who do
not know what a dangerous disease it was and how people (and dogs) worked to
curb its tide. (And horses, by the way, for they would inject horses with the
virus, wait for them to make antibodies, and then extract the serum.)
There have been horrible diseases in the past. We are not
unique. And I wanted to remind people that there are scientists at work trying
to ease human beings' suffering.
I, too, was worried about the ramifications of this
current vaccine. It truly isn't a vaccine, for it has neither an alive or dead
virus, but instead a genetic messenger that tells our cells to seek out and
destroy the Coronavirus.
People were leery because it is so new, involves
genetics, and was developed quickly, without FDA approval (which it now has).
More than leery, they were scared and outraged.
The hype told us we would be made magnetic. We would be
connected to the Cell towers. We would be filled with nano-particles. It would
affect our reproduction. It would affect our DNA. (It doesn't. It is RNA, the
messenger of DNA.) One reason the vaccination came out quickly was that some
scientists were already working at the genetic level. So, they had some idea of
where to go. (It still took a year.) Yes, it is all new and fearsome, and it's
true we don't know what we don't know.
But to say all vaccinations are harmful is "Throwing
the baby out with the wash water." I remember a pediatrician speaking to a
group of preschooler's moms. (When I was a preschooler mom) "You have two
children," he said, "And we'll keep them alive."
They are poisoning us yell some. They are injecting us
with nano-particles. They will make us magnetic and hook us up to cell towers.
They are killing us.
Now really. If the promoters of vaccines wanted to kill
us, why not just let the virus do it? (Oh, but that's too random.)
Dystopian novels such as 1984, have become popular of late (Dangers of totalitarianism, government surveillance, censorship), which shows how fearful people are.
I used Diphtheria as an example of how babies have been
saved. The Diphtheria Vaccine has been given to babies since 1928. We give it to our babies and go on
our merry way without knowing the horrors from which we have saved them.
I remember Polio, too, and how happy we were to have the
Salk vaccine. When I was a child, our mothers wouldn't let us go to the public
swimming pools during the hot months of summer for fear of contracting Polio. I
knew several people who had it. When I was a very young child, a little girl next door, wore the leg braces you might have seen in the movie Forest Grump.
If you don't worry about people, read about Jane Goodall's
chimpanzees who contracted Polio, and dragged their hindquarters, and
couldn't clean their beds at night. Usually, chimps build a new clean bed every
night. You could see how that would keep them clean and help keep fleas at bay.
Ravished by Polio, they couldn't build a new bed. Some of Jane's workers would
climb up into the trees and clean the beds for the chimps.
You see how mixed this is, how muddy the waters are, and
what a shame we are fractured and polarized. And one of the cheap medicines, Ivermectin,
that can help prevent or assist in the healing of this virus has been withheld
from us. The medical community says it does no good. However it has assisted the healing of many, and had caused no harm. Not one person has died using Ivermectin. Yes, and many have resorted to the use of the Horse wormer Ivermectin, because human-grade cannot be obtained, or if found, is exorbitantly priced. (Not one person has been harmed using the horse paste. Yellow journalism tells us it is toxic to human beings.) We will cry horrors at the use of horse paste, yet we use horse's serum to heal Diphtheria. (And millions of women use Premarin, a hormone replacement therapy, that is made from mare's urine, with disastrous results for the mare I might add.) Ivermectin has been proven to be safe. And it has
been used for over 40 years with no deaths from its use. If you can manage to
get hold of it, the price will be sky-high. While it was once cheap.
Now isn't
that a crime?!
If a person with Covid19 goes to Urgent Care asking for a
medicine that can help, they are turned away, saying they aren't sick enough.
If they get sick enough, they can go into the hospital and be placed on a
ventilator where their breathing is done for them. Maybe they will recover,
maybe not.
I don't know where we are going with all this. At first,
I was Pro-choice on vaccines. Take them or don't take them. It's your choice.
But I'm tired of the fight. I'm tired of the polarization. I'm tired of the I'm
right, you're wrong mentality. The truth is we are all muddling along. But for
us to fight each other is ridiculous. To get one's blood boiling over disagreements
is a big time and energy suck. Plus, a crying shame when we ought to be pulling
together.
Diphtheria is still a killer; the mortality rate usually
cited is 5 to 10 percent, but fatalities can be incredibly high in areas where
medical care is unavailable. A 2011 outbreak in Nigeria had a case fatality
rate of almost 43 percent in children 4 and younger.
The Sled Dog Story:
A statue exists in Central Park New York of a Siberian Husky named Balto who was the lead dog that brought in the diphtheria serum to Nome Alaska, and he mistakenly became the hero. Although all the dogs who made that run were heroes.)
However, the true unsung hero was a Husky named Togo.
Those in the know finally acknowledged that it was the Siberian Husky Togo who was the unsung hero in the delivery of Diphtheria serum to Nome in 1925. Togo as the lead dog, and Leonhard Seppala, as his musher, with The temperature was estimated at −30 °F
(−34 °C), and the gale
force winds causing a wind chill of −85 °F (−65 °C).[11]
made incredible time in their mad
dash east, covering over 170 miles in just three days. The longest of any team. (Balto covered only 55 miles.)
Togo was twelve years old.
Some insisted the run would kill Togo, but Seppala wouldn't go without him--thinking he needed him to survive, for the dog had on other occasions saved him and his team. (The dog probably would have escaped to go with them anyway, for as a pup he would escape the kennel to run with the sleds. )
Togo was made of the stuff that makes movies. He was a runt, sickly, and obstinate.
(He was tenderly nursed by Mrs. Seppala.) Due to his size, Seppala, the breeder, decided he would never make a good sled dog so he
gave him away to be a pet. Togo ran through a plate glass window to get back home.
At that point, Seppala decided he would do what he was skilled to do, train sled dogs,
so he harnessed the scrawny pup to the sled line. The harness calmed him, for then it must have gotten what he was meant to do.
Togo ran 75 miles that day--unheard of for such a young dog.
Soon Togo was out of harness, and on the lead line.
On the return trip from Nome Alaska, the team was stranded on an ice floe. Seppala tied a rope on Togo, anchored the other end to the floe, and threw Togo five feet across water to the shore. He thought Togo could
pull the floe across the divide. To his horror the line snapped. Amazingly, the once-in-a-lifetime lead dog
had the wherewithal to snatch the line from the water, roll it around his
shoulders like a harness, and eventually pull his team to safety.
Togo lead dog
