Infectious diseases have ravaged human populations regularly since forever.
Bubonic plague. Spanish flu. Yellow fever. Tuberculosis. Polio. Measles. Mumps. Rubella. Ebola. West Nile. Most of us walk around with a permanent tattoo on our shoulders left by vaccinations to ward off childhood diseases that in an earlier age would have maimed or killed us.
In Alaska, white man’s diseases like smallpox were particularly devastating to Native people.
Apparently, we forgot all that.
How else to explain our failed response to the COVID-19 virus, besides the imbecile in the White House?
Right here in Haines, Alaska, we forgot. How else to explain why we stood by when the State of Alaska closed the Main Street office set up decades ago explicitly to protect people from communicable disease?
In May 2016, the Alaska Legislature eliminated money for staffing our Public Health Office. Operated at one time by the federal government, the office safeguarded public health for nearly 70 years, even when there was no doctor practicing in town.
I reported on the closure on the front-page of the May 12, 2016 Chilkat Valley News, but no one seemed to notice much, or to care. A few weeks previous to that I asked borough-hired lobbyist Bill Thomas about the proposal to eliminate the office and he knew nothing about it.
Along with elimination of public health office staffing, a special refrigerator with back-up power for storing vaccines was to be disconnected, shifting availability to Juneau.
A few people were following the closure, and knew it was a mistake. “I see this as a big loss,” local nurse Lisa Schwartz told the CVN. “We certainly have other health care that fills the need, but it fills it in a different way.”
Haines resident Joan Snyder also knew it was a mistake. Snyder came to Alaska as a public health nurse in 1970, working with tuberculosis patients in Kotzebue.
“The big thing in Alaska was TB. In Kotzebue, we still had a lot of patients we were monitoring,” as well as dealing with whooping cough, diptheria, tetanus, measles, mumps and rubella.
Snyder did what today is called “contact tracing,” tracking diseases to make sure they aren’t spread.
As opposed to a clinic or hospital, the role of the health nurse is not so much to treat casualties as it is to meet the enemy on the battlefield, Snyder said. “The public health nurse did more outreach. The nurse has the power and the authority to reach out to homes and check on people and to bring them in. We did a lot of immunizing children.”
What happened to the emphasis on public health? Did successful vaccines breed complacency?
“I don’t think people are complacent,” Snyder said. “They think (science) will come up with new vaccines… A big change was penicillin. That could treat so many things that we couldn’t treat before. New things came along and old ones got vaccined out. The job became more preventative. We didn’t have as many diseases to worry about, and nothing like (COVID),” Snyder said.
In recent years, the public health office in Haines shifted its emphasis to women’s and family health, birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. During the first nine months starting July 2014, the office saw 673 visits, including 208 immunizations, 264 visits by children and 58 cases related to STDs.
A fully staffed public health office in Haines could have been on the front lines of the COVID outbreak, providing tests, formulating directives, tracing the activity of victims to ensure others weren’t infected, and eventually administering vaccines.
But we forgot about infectious disease. In the name of saving money, we skipped the ounce of prevention. Instead we will be billed for a pound of cure.