Infectious disease

“Meninjitters”: The Bay of Islands Epidemic of 1941

20 July 2020 Leave a Comment

Lachy Paterson

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has been described, perhaps accurately, as a one-in-one-hundred-years event, but during its history New Zealand has a number of “scares” and lockdowns because of infectious diseases that have had detrimental impacts on Māori. In 2020, the memory of these epidemics has led some Māori communities to attempt to keep the coronavirus away from their own communities.

Historically, Pākehā were more concerned that Māori would spread disease to them. Māori were sometimes seen by Pākehā as a weak link in New Zealand’s chain of health defences, with poor, overcrowded and unsanitary housing and customs that could potentially spread disease. Māori, often due to poverty or lack of access, were also less likely to seek medical treatment, and epidemics could hit their communities hard.

Rememberance

27 April 2020 5 Comments

A short story by M. L. E. Brown

He lifts his nose out from under the scratchy blanket. If he can just get there, he will never complain about the cold at home again. He doesn’t want to be awake. Back within the dream, a warm breeze still ripples the kawakawa bushes in his parents’ garden. His mother is inside making tea from the leaves – an old Māori remedy – as she always does whenever any of them have aches or fevers. She adds mint and then steeps the brew a long time before serving it with honey and lemon …

The tent smells of carbolic, starch, and eucalyptus oil. He must be getting better. It’s been days since he could smell anything. Outside, in the distance, he can hear the band playing “Abide With Me”. It is April 25th. Has it really been three years since those terrible landings? He wants to attend the Remembrance Service. But he can’t even get up.

All the beds in this hastily built isolation ward are full. Spanish Flu starts off as a fever and turns into pneumonia fast. Having got all the way from Gallipoli to Bapaume without a scratch, it never occurred to him he might be felled by a ruddy virus.

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On not being Ashley

27 April 2020 26 Comments

Lucy O’Hagan

It’s 5 April, 2020. The country is in lockdown. Waiting. The pandemic hasn’t quite reached our shores but I feel a need to rise to the occasion, offer my services at the front line instead of faffing around as I have been, writing a book about being a doctor while doing little of it, and teaching others how to do it while wondering if I still have that sharpness in me, that quick pattern recognition, that diagnostic edge, that confidence that I know what I don’t know, drug doses at my fingertips, that glorious feeling that I can do all of this and simultaneously manage the unexpected, the macabre, the lost and the uncertain.

I had imagined myself as a pandemic doctor giving unction to the dying in virus-infested houses, but in reality I have spent the week doing telephone consultations at my kitchen table in my socks.

I want to be heroic, as doctors are meant to be, but actually I’m terrified at the idea of exposing myself to a lethal viral load while tending to those coughing and hoiking and drooling. Me, with no mask and no drugs. I have read the grueling stories of doctors in Italy and New York. But this is New Zealand and already some good keen bloke is in his shed making plastic face shields with his 3D printer and attaching these to small helmets and delivering them free to doctors around the country. I have one and I feel safer.

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Bletchley Park 2020: Breaking the viral code

20 April 2020 1 Comment

Alex McLellan

What is the COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 virus? Compared to most threats we encounter, the virus is small and simple. It doesn’t have sex, possess limbs or gills, or fill its lungs with air on a hill top and shout “It’s great to be alive!”. So is the virus alive, or just an organic robot? We talk of ‘killing’ the virus by washing our hands or using disinfectants, which means most of us think of it as a living creature of some sort. Whether we classify it as the ‘living’ or the ‘undead’, it is still a parasite that steals into our cells and helps itself to our enzymes and cell materials to make thousands of near-perfect copies of itself that go on to infect other cells in our bodies.

For the last few months I have been obsessively reading each major scientific discovery about the new SARS-CoV-2 virus, and delving into its close relatives that caused earlier epidemics of ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ (SARS). During the COVID-19 pandemic it has been difficult to stay asleep, and I wake wondering how the virus does this and that … then grab my iPad to search for the answer. Surprisingly, this research provides me with a lot of comfort. The more I get to know the inner workings of this terrible machine, the better I’m able to break it down to its basic parts. The more I research, the more clearly I can see the virus in my mind’s eye, and the more clearly I can see possible targets for treatment interventions and routes to vaccines.

Bread-making gone viral

20 April 2020 2 Comments

Meena Al-Emleh

Bread is such an essential part of the foodscape of twenty-first century New Zealand that, apart from food preference or allergy, it is often spared little thought in people’s day-to-day lives. That was until now – people who usually bought bread regularly are now baking it (if they can get enough flour) and rediscovering the pleasure of a freshly baked loaf from the oven. We now might worry about touching the bag the flour was bought in but we don’t distrust a bought loaf. This was not the case during the 1940s, when a number of major acts regarding food hygiene were introduced. One of these laws in particular – the bread-wrapping regulation – had the attention of the Ministry of Health, bakers, grocers, and the New Zealand public for a period spanning 1946 to the end of 1948. Fears concerning an earlier dreaded virus, poliomyelitis, were at the root of the issue.

The entire New Zealand wheat industry had deep ties to the government from the First World War which controlled the price of bread. Control was slowly relaxed over time, but during the Great Depression a wheat surplus crashed the market, leading to further trouble in the economic sector. By 1934 the NZ Master Bakers Association was calling for full regulation of wheat and bread prices once more, and in 1936 the Labour government did just that. Labour also created a Wheat Committee, involving representation for farmers, millers, bakers, grain merchants, and grocers in the new industry processes. The committee would buy the entire seasonal wheat crop and sell it on at a uniform price for everyone. Although this systematic restructuring benefited countless people, lower bread prices brought lower profit margins. It was for this reason that the costly practice of wrapping bread in waxed paper declined.

Community transmissions

6 April 2020 13 Comments

M. L. E. Brown

‘Community transmission’ is a term the entire world will be much more familiar with after the Covid-19 pandemic. In medical parlance, the term refers to the apparent absence of epidemiological link within a community beyond its confirmed cases. It might also be applied in a holistic sense, when the reach of mass catastrophe seeps into cultural and emotional memory.

My parents were older than those of my schoolmates. Born in 1913 and 1918 respectively, they were middle-aged by the time I was born in 1966. Theirs was the generation of New Zealand infants who started life scarred by the immediate effects of World War One. My mother was a wonderful sick-nurse. I remember an occasion when my elderly aunt and uncle caught a serious ‘flu. I recall myself in my mid-teens, hovering in the kitchen of their villa while my mother swept upstairs bearing reheated lunches she had pre-cooked at our place; and then downstairs again with linen and towels to be flung in my aunt’s ancient washing machine.

I wasn’t allowed upstairs. “Don’t eat that!” my mother snapped as I picked up a malt biscuit left over from my uncle’s barely-touched tray. She, who could never abide waste of any sort, scraped all the untouched food onto a tin plate and marched it out to the compost. She gave me some rubber gloves and told me to do the dishes and scrub the bench thoroughly with hot water and Vim. Afterwards, I mopped the kitchen and laundry floors with even hotter water and Janola while she returned upstairs to help the afflicted pair from their chairs back to the master bed she had already re-made with clean linen.