This can lead to death from asphyxiation. This membrane (visible below over a patient's tonsils) covers healthy tissues in the throat, nose, tonsils and voice box, causing a croup-like cough, as well as severe difficulty breathing and swallowing. Dead tissue then builds up in the throat or nose, forming a thick, gray coating dubbed a 'pseudomembrane'.

Diphtheria can attack healthy tissues in the respiratory system. Symptoms usually begin two to five days after exposure and include a fever, sore throat and weakness.

The polar night also meant that there were limited hours of daylight to fly.ĭiphtheria is a bacterial infection caused by exposure to the bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheriae, often by way of direct contact or through droplets in the air (sneezing or coughing). Temperatures across the Interior were at 20-year lows. The only planes they had were water-cooled aircraft from World War I, which didn't perform well in cold weather. Nome is clear across the state from Fairbanks, a flight distance of approximately 521 miles. It was only in the previous February that the first airmail flight in Alaska took place. His telegram is pictured below.įlying was relatively new at the time and winter flight was still largely untested. Public Health Service in Washington, D.C., pleading for help.

Desperate, he sent radiotelegrams to the other major towns in Alaska and one to the U.S. Welch had ordered more diphtheria antitoxin from the health commissioner in Juneau, but the port closed for the winter before the shipment arrived. The next day a seven-year-old girl was diagnosed and Welch tried to give her expired antitoxin (all that was on hand) in hopes that it would work, but she died several hours later. After four children took ill and died, the town's only doctor, Curtis Welch, eventually diagnosed diphtheria in three-year-old Billy Barnett, who died just two weeks after the onset of symptoms. In the winter of 1924-1925, a diphtheria epidemic was threatening the town of Nome, located on the southern Seward Peninsula on the northwestern coast of Alaska. Was the diphtheria threat to Nome really as bad as it's portrayed in the movie? Photo: Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Library and Archives Champion dog musher Leonhard Seppala (left) circa 1925 and actor Willem Dafoe (right) as Seppala in the Disney Togo movie.

The cruelest miles book