Toksook Bay

My trip to Toksook Bay was tiring, but it was pretty interesting. We flew to Bethel, and then got on a "puddle jumper" to Toksook Bay. Toksook Bay still has quite a bit of snow (the entire bay is still frozen over), so we were met by a snow machine with a "sled" in tow. I wish I had a picture of the sled. It was a coffin sized plywood box that the 4 of us, and a tribal elder climbed into and were towed across the tundra to the clinic. (Let me tell you, the tundra is quite bumpy.)

At the clinic we were enrolling people in the study. This is the first year of a 5 year study looking at the carriage of Streptococus pneumonea---a germ that can be found at the backs of peoples' noses. It's a fairly common germ (~1/3 of the population has it, and usually don't get sick) but it can cause pneumonia, meningitis, ear infections, and strep throat. So the study is trying to figure out how many people have the germ (lives in the body around 10 days) and which sub-types they have. Everyone who signed up got a $25 check for participating. All they had to do was answer a few questions and then have a nose swab, which consisted of a skinny and flexible q-tip being shoved to the very back of their nose.

Toksook Bay seemed much more remote than the last village I went to--even though this one was considerably larger. There were about 500 people in Toksook Bay (428 signed up for the study). Everyone spoke Yupik. In fact, their schooling is only in Yupik until the 3rd grade.