Yukon Kuskokwim Nushagak science

A project to identify the 67 books that best capture Alaska history has been published. Several of the books have been recommended here

• Alaska History reading list - http://ykalaska.uniblogs.org/?p=93

or at

• http://cerebraloddjobs.edublogs.org/special-projects/st-innocent-of-alaska/ St Innocent of Alaska Bicentennial (Ioann Veniaminov)

WHAT IF YOU GOT A BUNCH OF HISTORIANS, LIBRARIANS AND OTHER hardboiled bibliophiles together in one room and asked them to list the most important books on Alaska history. How many of them would be on the same page? Precious few, it turns out.

That’s why “The Alaska 67,” a book about important books, has been so much longer in the making than anticipated. Now that it has finally reached local bookstores, project directors Frank Norris and Bruce Merrell would be justified sending birth announcements.

Read the background here–

• http://www.adn.com/life/hometown/story/8281993p-8178469c.html

A short list is here

• Quick looks at The Alaska 67 — the state’s best nonfiction books - http://www.adn.com/life/hometown/story/8281993p-8178468c.html

Technorati Tags: Alaska+history, books, readings
Site Search Tags: Alaska+history, books, readings

Influenza in Alaska: Hearings Before the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate,…
By United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations.
Title: Influenza in Alaska
Publisher: G.P.O.
Author(s): United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations
Publication Date: 1919
Pages: 21

Google Books has just started allowing downloads of books in the public domain! here is this report, in pdf format.

http://tinyurl.com/kgusd

A project funded by the NSF Arctic Social Sciences program entitled White Plague: A Historical Ethnography of Tuberculosis Among Yup’ik Peoples of Southwestern Alaska examines the social effects of tuberculosis (TB). This disease was endemic in the Alaska Native population during the 19th century. Due to increasingly sustained contact with outsiders, by the mid 20th century it had reached epidemic proportions, devastating many rural communities. In the 1930s, one out of three Alaska Natives died of TB. In southwestern Alaska, Yup’ik people had one of the highest reported incidence and prevalence rates in the world. By the 1950s, it was estimated that one out of every thirty indigenous Alaskans was in a tuberculosis sanatorium, most located outside of Alaska in the Seattle/Tacoma area, remaining there for two or more years….

By the mid 1950s, a massive public health campaign against TB in Alaska was well underway, and within two decades dramatic improvement occurred in both morbidity and mortality rates with the introduction of intensive control efforts, including chemotherapy, quarantine measures, and surveillance. By the 1970s, tuberculosis was no longer the primary cause of death among Alaska Natives The ways indigenous people responded in their everyday lives to the desolate circumstances and public health interventions have largely gone unexplored. Linda Green, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, leads the Alaska-based research team collecting oral histories from community members in three villages — Hooper Bay, Chevak, and Nunapichuk — in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and interviewing public health and medical practitioners who provided services to those with TB….

After data analysis is complete, Green will write a historical ethnography focusing on how processes of modernity — specifically, changing public health and medical policies and practices — influenced a reworking of Alaska Native identity, social relations, and social organization.

For more information, contact Linda Green (lbgreen AT email DOT arizona.edu; 520-621-6291).

Witness the Arctic: Chronicles of the NSF Arctic Sciences Program Spring 2006, Volume 12 Number 1, page 4, is published biannually by ARCUS

http://www.arcus.org

Site Search Tags:
Chevak
Hooper+Bay
Nunapitchuk
orphan
Seattle
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tuberculosis
Yup’ik

This is an interesting read about a previous pandemic of avian influenza. Note the impact of behavioral change on the epidemiology of the disease and why the disease would affect people differently in St Louis from Philadelphia.

It is a good example of why histories from that era (and later pandemics like the 1960s out here) are so important to record, study, and learn from. I encourage every reader to collect those stories. And to compare what is learned from the past with contemporary planning
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Human Hantavirus on the Rise
Between January and March of this year, health departments from Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, and Washington State reported an increased incidence of human hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS)….

So far, the only treatment for HPS is supportive care, and survival depends on early recognition, hospitalization, and aggressive pulmonary and hemodynamic support. Even with treatment, human HPS has a mortality rate of 30% to 40%….

Reuters Health Information2006

http://mp.medscape.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e3z10LfhuS0Dyr0HcL10EE

More information can be obtained at

http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus

photo from wikimedia, http://tinyurl.com/hgwnd

Cute, eh? When I checked a few years ago, there were some deermice in southeast Alaska (British Columbia) but I haven’t heard of any hantavirus from these creatures. But, like the woodchuck (a.k.a., groundhog, another marmot in Alaska), the deermouse, along with the cougar and the coyote [I think] may move up the corridor that runs from BC to Fairbanks.

I think it is useful to put the possibility of the next pandemic in the social and medical contexts of previous pandemics. (The last pandemic was 1968. But 1986-87 was a vicious seasonal flu in some parts of the country.)

This first reference is from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) archives. The news stories are really interesting. The one I mentioned below conveys some of the feeling of people at the time of the last pandemic. The files (radio or TV) are also small enough to download and play on a dial-up line.
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This is a one-page summary graphic of the virus, historical influenza pandemics, and flyways. Nicely done, but in pdf format.

On the move File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat -

Lorena Iñiguez. Los Angeles Times. Hippocrates describes a disease that is … The virus, they believe, is being spread by wild birds as they travel along …

Sources: American Scientist, Institute of Medicine, Lancet, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Wetlands International, World Health Organization Graphics reporting by Rosie Mestel, Tom Reinken and Karen Kaplan

Today is World TB Day. Many people in our area remember the TB impacts and prevention of their childhood. Some of the lessons learned then will be useful in preparing for any new pandemic. Unfortunately, younger people do not know that history; others have forgotten it. Remember the caution not to spit? Now that it is still sub-zero temperatures, check out the funny-looking little cones of ice in the AC store parking lot. Pam

Virulent Drug-Resistant TB Strain Emerges
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer
March 24, 2006 Read the rest of this entry »

This reference comes from the excellent The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2006. http://scout.wisc.edu/ The Scout Report (ISSN 1092-3861) is published every Friday of the year except the last Friday of December by the Internet Scout Project, located in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Computer Sciences. It is a refereed listing of Internet sources of science, math, and engineering information. Pam

5. The Deadly Virus: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 [pdf] Read the rest of this entry »

Karen Fluegel, former teacher at the Moravian Children’s Home and retired manager of the Moravian Book Store, recommends reading these books. They should be available at the Kuskokwim Consortium Library.

by Robert Fortuine. 1989. Publisher: University of Alaska Press. ISBN: 0912006587 (an excellent book)

by Susan Meredith with Kitty Gair and Elaine Schwinge. 1998. Published by Alaska Public Health Nurses Assoc. (about the ship of nurses which visited Villages, 1946-48) 0-965984-91-5, http://www.uaf.edu/uapress/books/AlaskasSearchforaKiller.htm

by Otto George. Publisher: Oregon Historical Society (1978). ISBN: 0875950620 (based at Akiak PHS hospital before it moved to Bethel).

by Nancy Jordan. 1996. Publisher: Epicenter Pr. ISBN: 094539750X (first Alaska health commissioner).

This is a good general introduction. The scientific references (bibilography) are useful. He also mentions the important role of historical Alaska Native tissue samples from 1918.

Nicholls H (2006) Pandemic Influenza: The Inside Story. PLoS Biol 4(2): e50
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040050

The origin of the 1918 pandemic strain, by contrast, has been harder to crack. Nearly a decade ago, Taubenberger and his colleagues made a real breakthrough; they found isolates of the 1918 pandemic virus in the formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded lungs of an American serviceman [5] (Figure 4). They subsequently retrieved further samples of this deadly virus from a second soldier and also from a flu victim exhumed from a frosty mass grave in Alaska. Since then, they carefully sequenced one gene after another until they completed the task last year [6].

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Focus on the Flu

Timeline of Human Flu Pandemics

timeline 1918-present

I would like to encourage a school class, maybe history or social studies or language, to collate the best suggestions from the published histories, so we could share them on this site. Here are some examples I had previously run across. Also a suggested reading list (see my comment on this post. Karen Fluegel’s reading list here) Pam

….Nowadays, many people believe that more children could have survived the epidemic, if their parents had known how to care for them. But because they had not encountered this kind of sickness before, many parents did not know what to do. For example, when temperatures of the children became extremely high, many parents did not attempt to cool them down. Some who did survive—and who are still alive today—may owe their survival to parents who had better information about how to care for them…. Lesson II: History of the Cup’ik People

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