Today on December 14, 2020, a critical care nurse in New York became the first American to receive the COVID vaccine. This begins a period of highly anticipated vaccine delivery in the weeks to come. The photo here harkens to another moment in American history when folks waited with bated breath for a cure for an epidemic. In this case, dogs featured prominently as heroes.
Diphtheria is a horrendous bacterial disease which was known as “the Strangling Angel of Children,” because of its horrifying lethality for the young. Spread largely through respiratory droplets, the bacteria causes a thick film to develop in a sufferer’s throat, coating it to the point of causing suffocation. It exploded around industrialized populations in the late 19th century. In the 1890s, an antitoxin which cured the afflicted by giving them antibodies to the bacteria was developed by researchers in Germany.
In Nome, Alaska, in 1925, diphtheria struck, and the only doctor of the city sent out a frantic telegram declaring that thousands would die without the antitoxin serum. Nome had recently lost about 50 per cent of its population from the Spanish Flu, and the situation was dire. Airplanes that could endure the Alaskan winter were unavailable, and so the “the Great Race of Mercy” was quickly formed.
Indigenous Alaskan mushers joined Leonhard Seppala (shown here) with several teams of dogs to traverse 674 miles in just five and a half days — the usual time was thirty. But the urgency of the emerging epidemic and the fact that the serum needed to be delivered quickly to survive the cold drove the sled riders to complete the race in record time. Seppala’s dog Togo was the lead animal, and both became famous after the race’s success.
Diphtheria in Nome, Alaska was averted, and the fame surrounding the “Great Race of Mercy” catalyzed a movement across America to inoculate against the disease. Today cases of diphtheria are extremely rare in wealthier countries such as the U.S., where a vaccine to prevent it is regularly administered to children.
Source(s): @microbe.tv — I write this history Instagram page, and this week am focusing on great moments in the history of immunisation. @_History Today_,”The Great Race of Mercy,”, Wikipedia, _Northern Light Media_, WordPress, “Leonard Seppala’s Serum Run,” Helen Hegener, 2015.
