Whooping cough among Western Cree and Ojibwa fur-trading communities in subarctic Canada : a mathematical-modeling approach

"European colonization of the New World, the Americas and Oceania, had a vast influence on the native people of the Americas--both epidemiologically and demographically (Kunitz, 1994). The European domination of the New World was assisted, and in some cases achieved, by the infectious diseases that they carried with them to the Americas and Oceania. The arrival of Old World diseases to the New World resulted in pandemics that devastated and demoralized certain indigenous populations (Ramenofsky, 1987). These are known as virgin-soil epidemics because indigenous populations in the Americas had no previously acquired immunity to these infectious diseases (Crosby, 1976). This thesis uses a computer model to explore the effect of a virgin-soil epidemic in a native population. Epidemic models of two Canadian fur-trade communities were made which reflected the unique structure of each. The first community modeled was the Moose Factory post and nearby Albany in the James Bay area of Ontario and their fur-rich hinterlands during the 1850s. The second community under examination was the Norway House post of the Keewatin District of Manitoba during the period of 1918-1919. Figure 1.1 shows the study communities in their respective provinces within Canada. These communities were chosen because ethnographic data in the Hudson Bay Journals as well as parish records were available for the years under study Pertussis, or whooping cough, and influenza are simulated in these community models. The reasons for choosing pertussis are four-fold. First, pertussis was a significant and threatening infectious disease before the advent of vaccines; and second, an actual pertussis epidemic occurred at Moose Factory during the time period under study (1852-1862). The Hudson's Bay Company Post Journals contain notations of an epidemic of whooping cough at Moose Factory in 1858--a time at which the Anglican Church parish records for Moose Factory became more accurate (Hoppa, 1998). Third, census data for Moose Factory was available for the year 1857. The fourth and last reason for choosing whooping cough for computer model simulations is that results from simulations of pertussis for the Moose Factory and Norway House regions can provide excellent insights into not only infectious diseases before the introduction of vaccines, but also how the structure of a community can affect the outcome of an infectious disease outbreak. Influenza was chosen as a comparison to pertussis for two reasons. The first is that influenza has been modeled by Sattenspiel and Herring (1998) for Norway House, Oxford House, and God's Lake and these can be compared and to the pertussis simulations for the Norway House model in this thesis. Second, results from simulations of different diseases for the same communities can provide insight into how influenza and pertussis differ in terms of the severity of their epidemics. Comparisons of models of infectious disease, such as pertussis and influenza, can help provide an understanding of virgin-soil epidemics where few historical and ethnohistorical data exist."--Introduction.

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