Mail by Runner 6: Pandemics Past

Tashi Delek!

Today’s Mail by Runner is a pandemic story from our Deputy Chair, Michael Gill.

For travel to Nepal in 1963, you had a smallpox vaccination which left its mark as a 1cm scar on your left arm.

None of us seriously thought we’d encounter smallpox but that year at the entry to Khumbu Ed’s expedition was asked by some Sherpas to look at a sick porter who they thought had hlendum, the centuries-old Sherpa word for smallpox. They were right and the disease was already spreading like wildfire.

The photo shows the eruptions of pox all over this boy who was dying. As we looked we were uncomfortably aware that the air in his room was teaming with a highly infectious virus and we wondered nervously whether that 1cm scar on a left arm really worked. The tragedy of that moribund child delivered a powerful pro-vax message.

Always the activist, Ed urgently contacted Kathmandu and had a plane-load of vaccines air-dropped in.

Mike Gill