Red Lake...the real scandal

Red Lake take four

Most people know about the murders in the Red Lake High School...which now seem to be a copy cat inspired from Columbine.`

But there is another Red Lake story that few remember...

Back in the 1950's there was an epidemic of strep impetigo and cases of scarlet fever that resulted in quite a few cases of glomerulonephritis...This was recognized as a problem in 1953 and written up in the literature, in Minnesota Medicine 1954 by Dr. Kleinman.

Native Americans often develop an itchy rash due to sunlight, and impetigo is a common complication , but not all strep strains cause kidney damage. The virulent bacteria was dubbed the "red lake" strain.

Essentially the epidemic was wiped out by culturing and treating everyone with strep.

Ah, but ten years later, there was another study...where people were observed and cultured, but only treated if they sought help. Since most people didn't bother to go to hospital and sit for three hours to get a minor sore throat or skin infection treated, a lot of the infections didn't get treated...and as a result, guess what?

A lot of people got glomerulonephritis.

And by the time the 1965 study was done, it was widely known that untreated strep infections could cause nephritis...

This in some ways is like the Tuskegee study, done to confirm what would happen if you didn't treat infection...and without those in the experiment really understanding what was going on...

To this day, the local Indians remember they were used as "guinea pigs"...

And I knew two of the "non treatment" cases who had kidney damage...

I have scans of about thirty pages of documents,