The outbreak of tuberculosis in the Canadian Arctic has caused disappointment in a remote Inuit community and highlighted the persistence of a disease that has largely been eradicated in the rest of the country.
The outbreak also reveals grim living conditions and overcrowding in many Arctic communities, despite Canada’s status as one of the richest nations in the world.
Authorities in Nunavut say there are 31 cases of active tuberculosis in the Pangnirtung neighborhood, a community of 1,500 people on Bafin Island. There are an additional 108 cases of latent tuberculosis, a form of the virus that puts patients at risk of developing an active form of respiratory disease in the future and may be resistant to vaccines.
Tuberculosis, one of the biggest killers in North America in the 20th century, is caused by the contagious bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which mainly attacks the lungs. May cause fever and in some cases chronic bloody cough. The outbreak in Nunavut is the worst since 2017, when a teenager died of the disease.
Until now, local authorities have opposed sharing accurate data with residents and news outlets. On Thursday, they released data showing the extent of the outbreak.
“The information had to be provided to us regularly to begin with,” Pangnirtung Mayor Eric Lawler told Globe and Mail. “It’s actually more disturbing than Covid.”
The Nunavut government spends about C $ 10 million a year on treatment alone, but says the costs of prevention and eradication are much higher.
Due to chronic overcrowding, poverty and lack of access to health care, the average annual TB rate among Inuit is 290 times higher than among Canadian-born non-Indigenous populations, according to a 2018 Public Health Agency report. Canada.
In 2020, there are 72.2 active TB cases per 100,000 population, according to the Public Health Agency. The national percentage of cases is 4.7 per 100,000.
The outbreak, although affecting health officials, also served as a stark reminder of the region’s worrying historical relationship with the disease.
Indigenous peoples, including the Inuit, have been inadvertent test subjects for experimental tuberculosis vaccines since the 1930s. This treatment is the subject of a class action.
In the early 1940s, the Inuit were separated from their families and taken to tuberculosis sanatoriums in southern Canada.
Many have lived in the facilities for years and their families have often not been told their whereabouts or conditions, even when they have died. The practice lasted until the 1960s.
The attitude towards the Inuit was the subject of an apology from Justin Trudeau in 2019.
“For too long, the government’s relations with the Inuit have been of double standards and of unfair, unequal treatment,” he said.
A year earlier, Trudeau had promised to eradicate tuberculosis in the region by 2030, a promise he seems unlikely to deliver on, given that disease rates have changed shortly since his promise. Although the coronavirus has delayed plans to eradicate it, critics say the lack of political and government funding is also to blame.
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