Simple illnesses

Or real fear in Pacific

By Michael Field

PEOPLE worry about an exotic disease like AIDS reaching into the Pacific but among medical experts the real fears are the seemingly simple illnesses that can slaughter vast populations in days.

And even today, with all the big advances, there is not a lot that can be done if something like influenza or measles hits a Pacific island.

Evidence of the power of such a tragedy can be seen behind an Apia churchyard where there is a mass grave which many believe is haunted - a result of some of its occupants still being alive when they were buried there.

November marked the 80th anniversary of the arrival of Spanish influenza.

In a remarkable blunder the New Zealand administrators of Samoa let the virus into Western Samoa - and then went on to spread it in Tonga and Fiji.

On November 7, 1918, the virus arrived in Apia and within a month 22 per cent of Samoans died in what the United Nations later termed “one of the most disastrous epidemics recorded anywhere in the world during the present century”.

Neighbouring American Samoa did not get a single case.

The warning for the Pacific is that the best medical advice suggests it will happen again.

Auckland public health official Dr.

Lester Calder said he had no doubt that another influenza pandemic was inevitable and with similar consequences.

“There are very limited medical inter ventions for the genetic shift in the virus,” he said.

There would be “extreme difficulties” to tailor a vaccine quickly enough and dis tribute it globally.

New Zealand Ministry of Health princi pal virologist Martin Tobias said a variety of anti-biotic drugs and anti-virdl agents that could help deal with the pneumonia’s that result.

“The death toll may not be as high when it occurs again, but it could be very substantial indeed,” Tobias said.

Proof - that it is the seemingly innocu ous diseases that pose a serious threat - was illustrated in the Federated States of Micronesia when 13 people in Chuuk State died of measles. There were nearly 1000 cases. The virus had come in from neigh bouring Guam.

What happened in Samoa in 1918 was a continuation of what had happened in New Zealand itself. A liner, Niagara, arrived in Auckland on October 12, 1918, with two dead and 131 sick. It had been quarantined in Suva, Fiji.

Prime Minister Bill Massey and Finance Minister Sir Joseph Ward were aboard so it was not quarantined in Auckland. Around 0.5 per cent or 5,471 New Zealanders died soon after.

The Union Steam Ship Company ship Talune left an epidemic stricken Auckland for the Pacific with one of its passengers, Reverend Paul Cane of the London Missionary Society, sick with the flu.

Talune arrived in Suva and was quaran tined, although somewhat casually, while 85 Fijian dock workers were taken aboard to help with cargo handling in later ports.

Fifteen were to die in the round trip voy age through Samoa and Tonga.

The ship arrived in Apia on November 7 and was greeted by port health officer Frank Atkinson who was told by Captain John Mawson there was nothing unusual aboard.

“We had sniffles, but nothing serious and we are all over it now,” Mawson said.

He knew of the Auckland epidemic - he carried newspapers with grim accounts of it - and Atkinson, would have known the disasters earlier measles and influenza epi demics had wrought on Pacific people.

Samoans in canoes around the ship knew something was wrong.

A man, Tuatagaloa, said one Falielo called out from the ship “there is sickness in this boat”. Tuatagaloa went aboard and among the first he saw was a girl, Ta’u, who was laying on the deck in a very weak condition.

“I saw there were many sick people on board,” Tuatagaloa said.

Atkinson saw Ta’u and sent her ashore saying she was “dangerously ill”. She died that night, Samoa’s first influenza death.

Cane went ashore, visited the bank and saw friends before being taken to hospital.

He survived.

Next day Talune sailed for Tonga and introduced influenza there. It killed 10 per cent of the population. It then returned to Suva and the virus arrived there.

On November 11 most of Apia turned out to mark the end of the war. The cele brations guaranteed a high kill rate from the virus.

A chief died in Apia and a fautasi or long boat came to get his body. The 17 men who rowed down all died in Apia.

At the Vaimea mass grave near Apia they buried 70 people in one day alone.

Some were still alive. Forced gravedig ger Newton Rowe wrote of the “putrid corpses and added “strong men with hearty constitutions and stomachs like iron had, after handling some of these bodies, sat on the roadside and vomited”. The epidemic crippled the new military rulers and

Administrator Colonel Robert Logan seemed to go mad.

A girl’s boarding school sought help only to have Logan show up and abuse them, telling them he would bum down the school and if the girls were hungry they could eat the dead horse he had seen.

In cables to Wellington he blamed Samoans for their deaths through neglect.

The US Navy, which ran American Samoa, had maintained a tight quarantine and the virus never entered. They sent a wireless message to Logan offering a full medical team. Logan, who hated Americans, ordered wireless communica tions with Pago Pago cut for eight days.

An Australian medical team arrived on December 2. New Zealand sent no help.

A formal inquiry found 7,542 people died, or 19 per cent of the total population, but added that with many still sick the final death toll would be around 22 per cent.

Atkinson and Mawson were blamed although no action was taken against either.

Logan fled to England.

“The introduction of influenza and the burying of the dead in a common grave has entirely changed their feelings, but this, I

hope, is only temporary and like children, they will get over it,” Logan wrote.

They never did.

This vulnerability has been known, and ignored, for nearly two centuries.

The idea of the Pacific paradise pollut ed by Europeans is ingrained in Western literature. Writer Herman Melville has one Polynesian character in Typee crying out “...we are all dying with your cursed dis eases. When will you give over?”

English explorer James Cook in 1773 in his journal wrote: “We debauch their morals already prone to vice and we intro duce among them wants and perhaps dis eases which they never before knew and which serve only to disturb that happy tran quillity they and their forefathers had enjoyed.”

Maori anthropologist Sir Peter Buck in a 1938 book refers to how “western man arrived with the host of deadly microbes that seem to accompany him wherever he goes”, adding “no branch of the Polynesians has suffered more for its kind ness and hospitality to Europeans than have the Marquesans”. In 1861 the ship Hirondelle, with a measles affected crew,

called at Anatom, Vanuatu. Within three months one third of the population was dead. It spread to Erromango where mis sionary George Gordon saw it as divine ret ribution.

“Were I to give you a catalogue of the crimes which this people have committed upon foreigner and among themselves for the last three years, you would be aston ished, and will not be surprised to learn that God has cut off two-thirds of them in some settlements if not in all.”

The islanders blamed him and hacked him into pieces with axes. In 1875 measles hit Fiji and 20 per cent of the population was dead. Thousands more died later from whooping cough. Measles hit Tonga in 1893 killing one-twelfth of the population, and as one contemporary observer report ed, “the remainder were so demoralised that they were nearly carried off with famine”.

Even today isolation can work against islanders and the population of Tokelau, north of Samoa, regularly suffers epi demics when outsiders come in, or islanders return home from aboard. AIDS might just be the latest of a long line. ■