The Shetland Bus and toxic shock syndrome

27:51The demonstration began and all the photographers went to cover the demonstration. And I stayed next to that mother and that girl with the white handkerchief. I just stayed there, kind of magnetized, let's say. and at one point the mother lift the girl up and they shouted the slogans together. And, well, that's where I took that picture. It's just three little pictures. First the mother with the girl lifted up, then I think the mother shouts, and then the two shout together.

28:30That final black-and-white photo, madre y hija, mother and daughter, was on the front page of the newspaper the following day. The picture would become a symbol of the resistance in Argentina and is still used today. The pair, wearing matching headscarves, are yelling, raising their arms in protest with clenched fists and anguish on their faces.

28:57I spent a lot of time trying to locate the mother. Many years later, I managed to locate her. because actually they are a humble family from a neighbourhood in Sarandí, which is a neighbourhood in the province. And then, well, they had gone to that demonstration because it was closer, but they didn't usually go to Plaza de Mayo, so I couldn't locate them. And when I finally located them, she told me that she was very impressed to see her daughter doing exactly the same gesture as her. It's like at the moment she hadn't realised it. She hadn't realised that I had photographed her either. Actually, she thought that obviously she knew the image, but she thought that it had been taken by one of the photographers who was there.

29:43They were a large group of photographers, and I was the only woman, so she didn't register me as a photographer. Well, that's it.

29:56The Plaza de Mayo in central Argentina is where these demos began in 1977. Mothers met here to demand the release of their children detained or disappeared by the regime. But the day the picture was taken, the march was held in the Plaza de Avellanada because of arrests in the usual location. Every week the mothers of the Plaza de Maggio, as they're known, demonstrate in an emotional parade, linking arms and weeping. The square is dominated by the President's palace, but the President refuses to see them. Argentina was under repressive military rule between 1976 and 1983, and many opposed to the regime were rounded up and detained, and thousands of prisoners were murdered.

30:50and I thought that the girl was the daughter of the missing person. Then, well, with time, when I managed to talk to her, when I located her, I found out the missing person was actually her brother, Abelino Freitas, who was a leader of Molinos. Molinos is a factory in Argentina and he was a worker delegate. And, well, he was kidnapped and he never showed up. I'm immersed in that. My life has to do with that whole situation. So it's not like I was participating in a march for the missing person from the outside, right? It's part of the basis of my life.

31:32That's because the picture also represents Adriana's pain. In 1978, her husband, the activist Guillermo Morali, who was known as Willy, disappeared.

31:48My partner is missing. He was murdered by the military. He was kidnapped by the civil military dictatorship, and he's still missing. I couldn't say how it affected me to participate in those mobilizations. I was a militant as well, and it is obvious that the topic of the disappeared touches me very closely. And I always thought that the topic of the disappeared and his death is in the dark zone that drives all my work. In fact, I started taking pictures a year after his disappearance. He disappeared in 1978. I started studying cinema in 1979 and there I took some photography courses and that's when I discovered photography and I embraced it with my soul and my life.

32:41and in 1980 I started studying photography. But I think that it has to do with his disappearance and not only that, what happened here in Argentina, the disappearance of so many people, the murder of so many people, had to do with perhaps embracing photography as an expressive medium, which is the medium of light in some way to conjure up so much darkness. Those are things that I thought about later.

33:22Adriana is still in touch with Blanca, the mother in that photo, and even sends her artwork that people have made using her original image.

33:39The struggle of mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the courage of the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who in the middle of the dictatorship, women who were mostly housewives, who had never had anything to do with marches or mobilizations or anything, and who in the middle of the dictatorship went out to confront the military. And it was the first resistance against the dictatorship, which is still going on. that came and that grows with time. What matters is that it's an image that came and that grows with time, that continues to grow, that continues to spread, that travels the world, that many feel it's their own, and that something happens that is very important, that goes beyond the circumstances.

34:30It goes beyond the disappearance of the brother of that woman and the uncle of that girl. it goes beyond the echo that image can have in my life or the disappearance of my husband and so many loved ones and the injustice and the pain that was experienced here in Argentina it goes beyond that because feminists take it as an image of struggle and suddenly it reaches other places that have nothing to do with Argentina so that it transcends its circumstances and that it's a human symbol in some way. Because suddenly feminists take it as a fight image. And suddenly it comes to other places that have nothing to do with Argentina.

35:19So it's to transcend their circumstances and to be a human symbol, in some way. The words of the Argentine photographer Adriana Lestido. she was speaking to Rena Stanton Sharma. Next, we've got a medical story from the past, and this is focused on a public health crisis in the US. In 1980, toxic shock syndrome, or TSS, emerged as a growing problem among women who used tampons. There were hundreds of cases, a special task force was set up, and there were court cases. GoldArthur has been speaking to Nancy King Ream, who was part of the task force. There were 800 cases in 1980 alone, and 40 of them resulted in deaths.

36:09And these were young women, mostly, who were dying, all linked with this commonality of using tampons. Nancy King Ream was a young researcher in the early 80s who was studying hormones and the menstrual cycle. She was paying close attention as the cases of toxic shock syndrome gathered public attention. Here's a report from local station KCAU in Iowa. I could barely move my arms and my legs. They were real weak. And my eyes, they had their bloodshot and they had hemorrhages in them. Researchers believe TSS starts with a vaginal infection. The tampon scratches the vaginal lining, and that causes infectious bacteria to spread into the bloodstream.

36:51The Centers for Disease Control linked superabsorbent tampons with this infection. And in the wake of deaths from TSS, there were lawsuits and settlements against tampon manufacturers. As a response to the crisis, in 1982, the Food and Drug Administration assembled a tampon task force, which brought together tampon companies and consumer and women's advocacy groups. Nancy was invited to join by her mentor, Esther Rome, who had authored the now famous book, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Esther was one of the strongest advocates and eloquent, outspoken. Esther asked Nancy to come on board because they needed an independent lab to test these tampons.

37:36This was when toxic shock syndrome was at its peak. And Rely was the product that seemed to really be heavily linked with deaths. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, the tampon that was statistically linked with this was a brand called Rely. When you actually opened it up out of the applicator, it looked like a teabag, and inside the teabag were all these little chips, like styrofoam chips from a styrofoam cup, and this carboxymethylcellulose, which really, oh, just sucked up the menstrual blood. And over time, the tampon itself got bigger and bigger, and more and more blood was absorbed.

38:22And women loved them, and they weren't taking them out. But when they tried to take them out, they found out that they had absorbed all the moisture in their vagina, so it was very difficult to take them out. They were so effective. And that effective absorbency turned out to be problematic. As for the Rely brand of tampons, Procter & Gamble recalled the product in 1980, under pressure of negative publicity, but disputed the link to TSS. So all the other tampon companies said, are we liable too? As it turned out, there was no one standard way to measure absorbency. Nancy was to carry out blind testing on these tampons without knowing the brands behind them.

39:03And then she found out the testing tool she was meant to use. The Syngina, which stood for, I think, synthetic vagina. that conjures up all kinds of crazy images, right? Well, the Syngina looks nothing like that. It looks like an eighth grade science project. You can Google it. It's a bunch of glass bottles and a water bath and tubing. And what flows in is the actual, the dye, the saline in one end of the glass bottle. And there's a tampon that's inserted into a condom that is supposed to replicate the vagina, and then the water bath is supposed to simulate the pressures against the vagina within this glass bottle.

39:50I mean, it's crazy, right? The blue dyed Syngina liquid was salt water, and this presented one of Nancy's biggest problems in testing. I was flabbergasted. I had been working with real menstrual fluid, And it is clearly a much thicker, more viscous liquid. Everybody, every woman knows that. But the only women at that meeting was myself and Esther Rome. So Nancy asked the question. Why aren't we using menstrual fluid? Oh, well, that's ridiculous, they all said, all the lawyers and all the tampon company representatives around the table. We can't do that. It's going to gunk up the syngina. The FDA sent a syngina to her lab, and Nancy and her team, all women, unboxed it.

40:40We called her Sally. We thought this is such a hoot. We've got to, you know, enjoy some of this. Since it seems so ridiculous, we went ahead and used not menstrual blood. Because how do you standardize menstrual blood across women, even across the same woman? It changes, you know, measurably. It changes pH, it changes viscosity, it changes amount, flow rate, and all those studies I had done prior to doing this absorbency test. So I knew all of that. So Nazzy decided to work instead with heparinized blood with no clots in it, which she got from a hospital blood bank. She tested the tampon samples with this, as well as the blue-dyed saline, all on the Syngina.

41:26Meanwhile, the task force meetings continued. There were comments more about, well, how tampons were never going to go out of style because women needed tampons because that was the only thing that could protect them. And that, of course, Esther was not happy about that. And she basically said, actually, this is not a disease. I don't need a medicine. I think you're thinking of menstruation as an illness. And the whole vibe of that group and the work of the committee kind of changed. And there was more respect. At the end of Nancy's testing, her results showed that the super absorbent tampons took in much more blood than saline.

42:10It was a substantial finding. And some of the tampon companies had to re-engineer their products as a result. But they wouldn't allow her results to be published because they considered it a trade secret. A few years later, Nancy's lab summarized the results for a letter to the editor in a widely read medical journal. Which wasn't very much, but at least it's on the record. And that was kind of the end, my final job, I guess. The task force was eventually dismantled in 1985. Nancy remembers it went out with a whimper, not a bang. The FDA was moving on to other things. It felt like I had accomplished something, you know, set a standard for absorbency.

42:52It wasn't until 1990 that a standardization of absorbency across all brands was released through this public service announcement from the FDA. Until now, a uniform labeling system that would permit consumers to compare absorbency between different tampon brands did not exist. So the Super Plus label on this brand and the Super Plus label on this brand did not necessarily mean the same thing. That's changing. The FDA also recommended alternating between tampons and pads. Today, all tampon boxes have information printed on the side that indicates their absorbency, the legacy of Nancy's work. Cases of toxic shock syndrome dropped dramatically after 1986, thanks to these national changes in absorbency and manufacturing standards.

43:42It was toxic shock syndrome that ushered in the menstrual movement to the public discourse for the first time. and tampon safety is still a topic that shows up in the headlines even today. GoldArthur was speaking to Nancy King-Ream, whose work on TSS helped change the law in the US. This week's Sporting Witness next, and this takes us to the moment when pastimes like riding BMX bikes and skateboarding were codified into proper sports. In 1995, the Canadian BMXer Jay Miron took part in the first ever Extreme Games. The event, now rebranded as the X Games, has been held every year since and become a global phenomenon.

44:26Jay Mirren, known in the sport as the Canadian Beast, has been speaking to Guy Kilty. It was thrilling, it was awesome, but I didn't understand it would change my life. Like literally, in every sense of the term change your life, it changed my life. Growing up in the city of Thunder Bay in the Canadian province of Ontario, Jay took to riding at the age of five. BMX started for me the day I got on a bike. I learned to ride it easily. I literally got on it and off I went pedalling down the street. I grew up jumping my bike all over the neighbourhood. I knew every bank, bump, jump, you name it. And then I found out there was a sport called BMX and I started racing and that was it.

45:12Like, there was never a choice. Like I wanted to grow up and be a pro BMX rider. And when I was 16, I told all my friends that was what I was going to do. And they thought I was nuts, you know, but it worked out. People joke like I was born to do this, but I really believe I was born to ride a BMX bike. It was daunting, but Jay turned pro when he was 18. If you turned pro before you were ready, you were going to get ridiculed pretty badly. So you didn't do that. Yeah, I knew I was ready. I ended up, it was in Indianapolis, Indiana. I got second in one discipline on the mini ramp, and then I got third the next day in the big vert ramp.

45:51And everyone high-fived me and said, you were ready, man. Congratulations, you turned pro. Jay's first few years as a professional in the early 90s were a far cry from the glamour and adulation he would experience later. It was a struggle. My first pro tour, because the way we made money before the X Games was doing shows. and demonstrations. And one of the guys said, I'm putting a tour together coast to coast across Canada. Do you want to ride in it? And I said, sure. So I think it was five days or seven days after I graduated from high school. Gradually, though, things started to get better.

46:28I got on a bigger sponsor and did more tours with them. And they sent me overseas for my first time to Seoul, Korea, and then to Budapest, Hungary. And that's when I got my first thrill of overseas travel and whenever I wasn't traveling I was back in Thunder Bay flipping pizzas doing whatever it took and I had this belief because when we did the shows I could see it in the people's eyes that it was exciting and I could see that probably just like a band saying man the crowd's loving us like we're gonna hit it's just that when you know and I did that for five years and then it hit. Action sports like BMXing, skateboarding and bungee jumping were popular among young people in the early 90s, but they barely featured on TV.

47:18That all changed in 1995 when a US sports network, sensing an opportunity to tap into a whole new set of viewers, organised the first ever Extreme Games. Not only that, they committed to televising everything. For Jay, this was a whole new experience. We got to the event and I saw the cameras, the camera towers. I saw boom cameras for the first time. I saw a cable camera for the first time. That's when I was like, this is nuts. Like, I'd never seen anything like it and I never knew those types of cameras even existed. The technical equipment may have been impressive, but not everything was. The accommodations actually sucked.

48:01They had us in a university dorm. I mean, you put a bunch of skateboarders and BMXers in a university dorm, you know what's going to happen. There's fights, parties, God knows what, you know. So it was a bit of a disaster. Jay competed in the BMX Dirt event. But what exactly did that involve? Well, freestyle is doing the tricks and the wild moves and the backflips and the spin, and racing's going as fast as you can around the track. The thing that kind of brings our sports together and makes it one big thing called BMX is dirt. Because it's kind of half freestyle, it's half racing. You know, you got the going fast and the going big from racing and then you got the tricks from freestyle.

48:46Each rider gets four opportunities to hurtle down the dirt track, up the ramp and then perform tricks in the air before landing. A team of judges score them on difficulty, execution and creativity And the jump is massive It's a 6 or 7 foot tall take off A 20 foot gap with nothing And then the landing And if you don't quite make the landing You hit a vertical wall So you're done So a lot of the freestylers that were going to jump Didn't even try Because they were too afraid Jay wasn't supposed to win this event His specialism was another form of BMX. I was not known as a dirt jump rider. I was known as a ramp guy.

49:31And nobody knew I grew up racing and I could jump big jumps. So they made a really big jump so that a freestyle guy wouldn't win. Before the main BMX dirt event, Jay and the other competitors did a few jumps to get warmed up. It did not go to plan. It was maybe only my second or third time jumping a jump that big. so my timing was off. It was more than double the length I was used to jumping so I over-rotated, stomped my foot and rolled my ankle. That's what happened. But adrenaline is wonderful when you're an action sports athlete and the athletic trainers were there to wrap me up and ice me and off I went.

50:11I started with a big backflip. I always like to start with a big bang and end with a big bang. I do not remember jump number two. number three was a big 360 and then number four it's a 360 with a bar spin thrown in and that was my big grand final and nobody thought I was going to try it over a jump that big but I nailed it I talked to my mom I called her to tell her I won and she said yeah I know I watch you on tv she said everyone we know watch you on tv they've been calling me all night

50:49The next day, everywhere I went, people knew who I was. So it aired in enough houses that all the people in America and Canada, they knew. So that was thrilling. Jay would go on to compete in the X Games for the next decade, travelling the world, while the TV networks fuelled the rivalries between him and the other athletes. I was the Canadian beast, the meanest guy of BMX. I was the bad guy. All my sponsors loved it. I hated it. But I ended up, I would go with it and I would laugh about it. You know, but I never did like it. We didn't know anything. We had no idea what was going to happen to us.

51:27And then just boom, we were the next big thing in American pop culture. Like it was hard to put into words how life-changing that is. It's now more than 30 years since Jay's win in the first Extreme Games. it couldn't have turned out any better. Like, there's people that get to live their dreams, and then there's people that get to live their wildest dreams. I lived a life far more amazing than all of my wildest dreams. I got to travel all over the world with my best friends, doing what I love to do. I look back on it with the best memories you could ever have. When my sport ended, I got into the business side of BMX, but I didn't like it.

52:14I didn't like sitting at a desk and I didn't like being so close to the auction and not being able to ride. So I sold my businesses, I went to school, I learned to design and build furniture and now I own a little business designing and building handcrafted furniture and I really enjoy it.

52:36Jay Miron was talking to Guy Kilty. Finally this week we return to the era of the Second World War In 1944, two Austrian mountaineers fled into the forbidden land of Tibet to escape from a British prisoner of war camp in India. Heinrich Harrer and his friend Peter Auschneiter spent seven years there. Harrer became a tutor to the young Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, and later wrote the famous account of his visit called Seven Years in Tibet. Simon Watts tells their story using the BBC archives. It's early 1946. After a journey lasting two years, two Austrian mountaineers finally reached the fabled city of Lhasa.

53:23It was January 15, 1946, when we for the first time saw the gleaming golden roofs of the Potala. We felt inclined kneeling down on our knees like the Tibetan pilgrims do when they for the first time see this holy palace of the Dalai Lama. With their clothes in tatters, Heinrich Harrer and his friend Peter Auschneiter entered a city that only a handful of outsiders had been given permission to see. It was late in the afternoon when we reached this famous western gate. We walked just through together with all the other pilgrims, with the merchants, with farmers, with caravans, with donkeys bringing loads into Lhasa.

54:11We had read so much about this holy city. It was forbidden. The whole country was forbidden. and now we had reached the dream of our life. Harare and Auschneiter were on the run from the British army in India. Shortly before World War II, they joined a Nazi mountaineering team who were arrested while scouting a peak in the Himalayas. After nearly five years in Indian detention camps, the pair escaped in 1944, taking the only route the British were unlikely to follow. First they hiked over one of the world's highest mountain passes. Then they crossed the seemingly endless Tibetan plateau. When we, on our escape, travelled for almost two years through the western part and met all the peasants and the nomads, they didn't know of the First World War or that there was a Second World War just going on.

55:10We, as Europeans, could go through the nomads' countries, for instance as Indians or Nepalese. We would have just been chillings, what they called all the foreigners. In Lhasa, that would have been impossible. The day when we reached Lhasa, they recognised us immediately. For some Europeans, and couldn't believe that we had come in winter through the so-called Changtang to the northern plains. Traders had brought something of the modern world to Lhasa. Harra was struck by seeing Bing Crosby records and lipstick in the market, but life in the city was still dominated by Buddhism. The two Austrians watched with fascination rituals that hadn't changed for hundreds of years, as Harra recalled in his book Seven Years in Tibet, read here by an actor.

56:03The Dalai Lama, the living Buddha, a child but the heart of the concentrated faith of thousands. In the spring, he would leave the Bhutala in a gorgeous procession for the summer palace. It marked the beginning of the warm season. Pilgrims from the remotest parts of Tibet would undergo countless hardships in order to witness once in their lives this brilliant manifestation of their religious faith.

56:37First came servants with the god-king's personal effects, carried in bundles. At an interval behind, rode monks with banners decorated with texts. We could not close our hearts to the religious fervour that radiated from everyone. Pious texts are constantly on their lips. Prayer wheels turn unceasingly. Some sit beside running streams, dipping images of Buddha into the current.

57:06The highlight of the Buddhist calendar were the celebrations marking Lunar New Year. Now came an athletics gathering. This tour was an important ritual that had to be performed. Men came out of the crowd to take each other on in wrestling bouts that had their own particular rules. There was no distinction between winners and losers. Both got a reward.

57:38We saw strange frame-like objects rising from the ground. They were for sculptures made by the monks out of butter of different colours. In the evening, there is a competition between monasteries in the production of these masterpieces, but by daybreak, they will have vanished. Their destruction is to drive home the Buddhist theme that all life is transitory and has no more substance than dreams.

58:08The two Austrians made themselves useful with translating and engineering work and were allowed to stay in Lhasa. In winter, Haro took particular delight in teaching Tibetans how to ice skate on the lake below the Potala Palace. One day, the 10-year-old Dalai Lama looked down with amazement at this walking on knives. He asked to meet Harrah, who then became his English tutor, as the Austrian recalled for the BBC. The young god king was extremely intelligent. Sometimes I gave him lessons, say about 10 sentences to make for the next day, and next day he had made 30 or 40. Harrah taught the Dalai Lama about everything from jet engines to international politics.

58:55It was very easy to be his tutor. Of course, I had always the difficulty of overcoming the opposition of the monks. They didn't like it very much that I had interfered with their sphere of interest. But the Dalai Lama wanted to know more about the outside world.

59:24For centuries, the Buddhist kingdom had tried to remain isolated, even though it was encircled by Russia, China and the British Empire. Hara didn't know it, but these were to be the last years of the old Tibet. In 1951, Chinese troops invaded, and the two Austrians were told to leave for their own safety. In 1959, the Dalai Lama himself had to flee. Among those waiting to greet him in India was Heinrich Harrer.

1:00:18and whether he still remembered me. The two men became Trok Po for life. Hara returned to Austria, where he wrote Seven Years in Tibet, a bestseller in the 1950s and later a Hollywood film. He continued to explore, but nowhere meant as much to him as Tibet, a lost world he felt privileged to have known. We loved very much to live in Tibet, and it was with great regret that we left it here. everybody is just racing around and nobody seems to have time for meditation or to think a subject over and people seem to be living only to make money the yaks, I compare all the speed of Asia with the yaks the yaks walk about 2 miles an hour and then they walk only about 3 hours a day and then they want time to lay down and graze around and have their rest.

1:01:17And I think most of the people live there in the same way.

1:01:25First broadcast in 2016, that was Simon Watts with the story of Heinrich Harrer and his friend Peter Auschneiter, who spent seven years in Tibet. And with those images of a bygone, slow pace of life in the mountain kingdom, we've come to the end of this edition of the History Hour. All our first-hand stories are archived on our website, which is well worth a visit, bbc.com slash witnesshistory. And we'll be back with more for you next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there.

1:02:03We weren't going to ask permission. We're just going to do it. It was such an amazing feeling. It was incredible. He started to write a story about how he came up with the idea for the red and yellow cars. I got to go. We cried a bit. We laughed a bit. It was wonderful. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

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