Download The Arctic`s Inuit are being contaminated by pollution

COLUMN ONE : Ancestral Diet Gone Toxic LA TIMES January 13, 2004
The Arctic's Inuit are being contaminated by pollution
borne north by winds and concentrated as it travels up the
food chain.By Marla Cone Times Staff Writer
QAANAAQ, Greenland — Pitching a makeshift tent on the
sea ice, where the Arctic Ocean meets the North Atlantic,
brothers Mamarut and Gedion Kristiansen are ready to savor
their favorite meal.
Nearby lies the carcass of a narwhal, a reclusive beast with an
ivory tusk like a unicorn's. Mamarut slices off a piece of
muktuk, the whale's raw pink blubber and mottled gray skin,
as a snack.
"Peqqinnartoq," he says in Greenlandic. Healthy food.
Mamarut's wife, Tukummeq Peary, a descendant of famed
North Pole explorer Adm. Robert E. Peary, is boiling the main
entree on a camp stove. The family dips hunting knives into
the kettle, pulling out steaming ribs of freshly killed ringed
seal and devouring the hearty meat with some hot black tea.
Living closer to the North Pole than to any city, factory or
farm, the Kristiansens appear unscathed by any industrial-age
ills. They live much as their ancestors did, relying on foods
harvested from the sea and skills honed by generations of
Inuit.
But as northbound winds carry toxic remnants of faraway
lands to their hunting grounds in extraordinary amounts, their
close connection to the environment and their ancestral diet of
marine mammals have left the Arctic's indigenous people
vulnerable to the pollutants of modern society. About 200
hazardous compounds, which migrate from industrialized
regions and accumulate in ocean-dwelling animals, have been
detected in the inhabitants of the far north.
The bodies of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit,
contain the highest human concentrations of industrial
chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on Earth — levels
so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some
Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste.
Nearly all Inuit tested in Greenland and more than half in
Canada have levels of PCBs and mercury exceeding
international health guidelines.
Perched atop a contaminated food chain, the inhabitants of the
Arctic have become the industrialized world's lab rats, the
involuntary subjects of an accidental human experiment
demonstrating what can happen when a heaping brew of
chemicals builds up in human bodies.
Studies of infants in Greenland and Arctic Canada who have
been exposed in the womb and through breast milk suggest
that the chemicals are harming children. Babies suffer greater
rates of infections because their immune systems seem to be
impaired, and their brain development is altered, slightly
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reducing their intelligence and memory skills.
Scientists say the immune suppression could be responsible, at
least in part, for the Arctic's inordinate number of sick babies.
They believe the neurological damage to newborns is similar
in scope to the harm done if the mothers drank moderate
amounts of alcohol while pregnant.
The tragedy for the Inuit is that they have few, if any, ways to
protect themselves. Many Arctic natives say that abandoning
their traditional foods would destroy a 4,000-year-old society
rooted in hunting.
In this hostile and isolated expanse of glacier-carved bedrock
and frozen sea, survival means that people live as marine
mammals live, hunting like they do, wearing their skins. No
factory-engineered fleece compares with the warmth of a
sealskin parka, mittens and boots. No motorboat sneaks up on
a whale like a handmade kayak latched together with rope. No
snowmobile flexes with the ice like a dog-pulled sledge
crafted of driftwood.
And no imported food nourishes their bodies, warms their
spirit and strengthens their hearts like the flesh they slice from
the flanks of a whale or seal.
"Our foods do more than nourish our bodies. They feed our
souls," said the late Ingmar Egede, a Greenlandic educator
who promoted the rights of indigenous peoples. "When many
things in our lives are changing, our foods remain the same.
They make us feel the same as they have for generations.
"When I eat Inuit foods, I know who I am."
Unexpected Poisons
In 1987, Dr. Eric Dewailly, an epidemiologist at Laval
University in Quebec, was surveying contaminants in breast
milk of mothers near the industrialized, heavily polluted Gulf
of St. Lawrence when he met a midwife from Nunavik, the
Arctic portion of Quebec province. She asked whether he
wanted to gather milk samples from women there. Dewailly
reluctantly agreed, thinking it might be useful as "blanks,"
samples with nondetectable pollution levels.
A few months later, the first batch of samples from Nunavik
— glass vials holding a half-cup of milk from each of 24
women — arrived by air mail at the lab in Quebec.
Dewailly soon got a phone call from the lab director.
Something was wrong with the Arctic milk. The chemical
concentrations were off the charts. The peaks overloaded the
lab's equipment, running off the page. The technician thought
the samples must have been tainted in transit.
Upon checking more breast milk, the scientists soon realized
that the peaks were, in fact, accurate: The Arctic mothers had
seven times more PCBs in their milk than mothers in Canada's
biggest cities.
COLUMN ONE : Ancestral Diet Gone Toxic LA TIMES January 13, 2004
Dewailly contacted the World Health Organization in Geneva,
where an expert in chemical safety told him that the PCB
levels were the highest he had ever seen. Those women, the
expert said, should stop breast-feeding their babies.
Dewailly hung up the phone, his mind reeling. He knew that
mother's milk is the most nutritious food of all, and that
Nunavik, located on Hudson Bay, is so remote that mothers
had nothing else to feed their infants. As a doctor, he couldn't
in good conscience tell them to quit breast-feeding. But he
knew he couldn't hide the problem, either.
"Breast milk is supposed to be a gift," said Dewailly, who
today is among the world's leading experts on the human
health effects of contaminants. "It isn't supposed to be a
poison."
Nearly a generation has passed since those first vials of breast
milk arrived in the Quebec laboratory. The babies Dewailly
agonized over are now 16 years old, about to pass to their own
children the chemical load amassing in their bodies.
Top of the World
From ice-clinging algae to polar bears, the Arctic has a long
and intricate ladder of life. An estimated 650,000 indigenous
people inhabit the top rung, and their population is steadily
growing. About 90,000 are the Inuit of Eastern Canada and
Greenland — a territory of Denmark under its own home-rule
government. Others, spread across eight nations and speaking
dozens of languages, include the 350,000 Yakuts of Siberian
Russia, Alaska's Inupiat and Yup'ik, and Scandinavia's Saami.
Environmental scientists suspect that industrial chemicals first
hitched a ride to the Arctic in the 1940s.
seabirds four or five links up the marine food chain.
Contaminants, which accumulate in animals' fat, magnify in
concentration with each step up, from plankton to people.
In newborns' umbilical cord blood and mothers' breast milk,
average PCB and mercury levels are 20 to 50 times higher in
remote villages of Greenland than in urban areas of the United
States and Europe, according to a 2003 report by the Arctic
Monitoring and Assessment Programme, or AMAP, a
scientific consortium created by the eight Arctic nations,
including the United States.
In far northern villages such as Qaanaaq, where the
Kristiansens live, one of every six adults tested exceeds 200
parts per billion of mercury in the blood, a dose known to
cause acute symptoms of mercury poisoning, according to a
2003 United Nations report.
"That's a huge amount of mercury," said John Risher, a
mercury specialist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention's toxic substances agency. "At that level, I would
really expect to see effects, such as paresthesia, an abnormal
sensation, tingling or numbness, especially in the hands."
Few details are known about Russia's Siberia, but AMAP
scientists are expected to soon release data showing that
residents of the region are more contaminated than
Greenlanders. In contrast, Alaska's Inupiat carry low
concentrations because they eat bowhead whales that are low
on the food web.
PCBs and DDT, the so-called legacy chemicals banned three
decades ago in most developed nations, peaked in the Arctic in
the 1990s and since then have declined, although they remain
at substantially higher levels in people there than elsewhere.
The chemicals, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs,
originate in the cities of North America, Europe and Asia.
They travel thousands of miles north via winds, ocean currents
and rivers. In the Arctic, the sea is a deep-freeze archive,
storing contaminants that are slow to break down in cold
temperatures and low sunlight. Ingested first by zooplankton,
the chemicals spread through the food web as one species
consumes another.
Other compounds are increasing, including mercury and
brominated flame retardants called PBDEs. Much of the
mercury comes from coal-burning power plants, largely in
Asia, while the United States is the major source of the flame
retardants, used in plastics and polyurethane foam.
Scientists say the Arctic's water and air are much cleaner than
they are in urban environments. PCBs and DDT in the fish and
mammals of such areas as the Great Lakes, the Baltic and the
North Sea are 10 to 100 times higher in concentration than in
the Arctic Ocean.
"Subtle health effects are occurring in certain areas of the
Arctic due to exposure to contaminants in traditional food,
particularly for mercury and PCBs," according to a 2002
AMAP report.
But most urban dwellers consume food from a host of sources,
eating comparatively limited amounts of seafood and no
marine mammals or other top predators high on the food web.
Instead, they consume mostly land-raised foods with low
contaminant levels.
lnuit, by contrast, eat much like a polar bear does, consuming
the blubber and meat of fish-eating whales, seals, walruses and
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Evidence has emerged recently that the contaminants are
threatening the health of Inuit infants and young children.
Building up over a lifetime, chemicals stored in a mother's
body cross into the womb, contaminating a fetus before birth.
Then the newborn gets an added dose from breast milk.
A study in Arctic Canada, soon to be published, has shown for
the first time that the risks of traditional foods seem to
outweigh their benefits, said Gina Muckle of Laval
University's Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in
Quebec, who directed the study.
COLUMN ONE : Ancestral Diet Gone Toxic LA TIMES January 13, 2004
In Muckle's study, 11-month-old Nunavik babies were
repeatedly shown a picture while researchers recorded how
readily the children recognized images they already had seen.
The infants with high amounts of PCBs in their bodies were
10% less likely to recognize the images than infants with low
PCB levels.
A separate, smaller study also linked PCBs with slight
neurological effects in older children in Qaanaaq. The studies
confirm similar neurological effects detected in children
elsewhere, including the Great Lakes region.
Also in Nunavik, infants exposed in the womb to high levels
of DDT and PCBs suffered more ear and respiratory
infections, particularly in the first six months of life, according
to a study by Laval University's Frederic Dallaire, also about
to be published.
Dewailly said the increased infection rate is the most serious
of the known threats because Arctic children suffer extremely
elevated rates of ear infections, which often lead to hearing
loss, and respiratory infections.
"Nunavik has a cluster of sick babies," he said. "They fill the
waiting rooms of the clinics."
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so important to us, so fundamental, that we will not be able to
survive without it."
Everything else, from tea to bread, must be imported. In
remote villages, stores stock processed and canned food that is
expensive, frequently stale and not very tasty or nutritious. In
Nunavut, across Baffin Bay from Greenland, store-bought
food for a family of four would cost $240 per week, more than
one-third of the average family income there, according to a
report by Canada's Northern Contaminants Program.
Jose Kusugak, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the
organization representing Canadian Inuit, said he can buy
"lame lettuce" and "really old oranges" and "dried up apples"
in Nunavut, or he can eat fresh and nutritious beluga, walrus,
fish and caribou. "There is really no alternative," he said.
In some respects, the marine diet has made the Inuit among
the world's healthiest people. Beluga whale meat has 10 times
the iron of beef, twice the protein and five times the Vitamin
A.
Omega 3 fatty acids in the seafood protect the Inuit from heart
disease and diabetes. Seventy-year-old Inuit men have
coronary arteries as elastic as those of 20-year-old Danes, said
Dr. Gert Mulvad of the Primary Health Care Clinic in Nuuk.
No Cows, Pigs, Chickens
A year-round icy shield — thicker than a mile in some places
— covers 85% of Greenland. The island has no trees, no grass,
no fertile soil, which means no cows, no pigs, no chickens, no
grains, no vegetables, no fruit orchards.
Instead, the ocean is Greenland's food basket.
Sandwiched between Canada and Scandinavia, Greenland gets
the brunt of the world's contaminants because it is in the path
of winds from both European and North American cities.
In the remote parts of Greenland, such as the Kristiansens'
village of Qaanaaq, people eat marine mammals and seabirds
36 times a month on average, consuming about a pound of
seal and whale each week. About one-third of their calories
come from traditional foods.
"We eat seal meat as you eat cow in your country," said
Jonathan Motzfeldt, who was Greenland's premier for almost
30 years and is now its finance minister. "It's important for
Greenlanders to have meat on the table."
The Inuit say their native food strengthens their bodies,
warming them from within like a fire glowing inside a lantern.
When they eat anything else, instead of fire inside, they feel
ice.
"We are living in a place that is very cold, and it's not by
accident we eat what we do. We are not able to survive on
other food," Lars Rasmussen, a 52-year-old hunter from Nuuk,
the capital of Greenland, said through a translator. "Hunting is
Although heart disease has increased with the introduction of
processed foods, especially among Greenlandic young people,
it remains "more or less unknown," Mulvad said.
Public health officials are torn over whether to encourage the
Inuit to continue eating their traditional diet or reduce their
consumption.
"The first goal of medicine is to do no harm, so I'm not
absolutely convinced we should restrict beluga fat. It has a
huge, huge beneficial effect on cardiovascular disease," said
Dewailly, who heads public health research at Laval
University Medical Research Center.
Government officials and doctors fear that Inuit will switch to
imported processed foods loaded with carbohydrates and
sugar, risking malnourishment, vitamin deficiencies, heart
disease, diabetes and obesity.
"The level of contamination is very high in Greenland, but
there's a lot of Western food that is worse than the poisons,"
Mulvad said.
Greenland's home-rule government and doctors have issued no
advisories. Many Greenlanders are aware of the
contamination, although they know few details. In Canada,
however, there has been extensive outreach to indigenous
people, including trips by Dewailly and other scientists to
explain their findings in detail. But public health officials
there still struggle, after 16 years, with what dietary advice to
give.
COLUMN ONE : Ancestral Diet Gone Toxic LA TIMES January 13, 2004
Last year, Nunavik leaders initiated an experiment in three
communities that gives women free Arctic char, a fish high in
fatty acids but low in PCBs, to encourage them to eat less
beluga blubber, the main source of contaminants there.
Most Inuit have not altered their diet in response to the
contamination, according to dietary surveys in Canada. In
Arctic cultures, people rely on the traditional knowledge of
hunters and elders, and with no visible signs of pollution or
people dying, many are skeptical that the chemicals exist.
Some even suspect talk about chemicals is a ploy to strip them
of their traditions.
Moreover, health officials point out that the risks of
contaminants are greatly outweighed by other societal
problems, including smoking, suicide, domestic violence and
binge drinking, which have a severe and immediate impact on
life and death in the Arctic. For example, more than half of
pregnant women in Greenland smoke cigarettes.
Those who are aware of the dangers of the toxic chemicals say
their meats are too nutritious and important to give up.
"People say whale and seal are polluted, but they are still
healthy foods to us," said Ujuunnguaq Heinrich, a minke
whale and seal hunter in Nuuk.
Anthropologists warn that efforts to alter Inuit diets can
unwittingly cause irreversible cultural changes. If hunting is
discouraged, people quickly would lose their traditional
knowledge about the environment and their hunting skills, as
well as material items such as tools and clothing, said Robert
Wheelersburg, an anthropologist at Elizabethtown College in
Pennsylvania who specializes in Arctic cultures.
Their art, their spirituality, their celebrations, their storytelling,
even their language would suffer. Inuit dialects are steeped in
the nuances of nature that their national languages — English,
Danish and French — ignore.
Wheelersburg said the most important damage would be to
Inuit "values and attitudes." In the Arctic's subsistence
economy, people share prey among neighbors and relatives,
even strangers. The best hunters are leaders in the village, and
they are generous with their wealth. If the Inuit switch to a
cash society, that communal generosity would disappear,
Wheelersburg said.
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their bodies.
They simply don't have the luxury to worry about dangers so
imperceptible, so intangible. Instead, hunters worry about
things they can hear and see: thinning ice conditions, the
whereabouts of whales, where their next meat will come from.
Anxiety about chemicals is left to those who live in distant
lands, those who generated the compounds, those whose
bodies contain far less.
About 850 miles from the North Pole, Qaanaaq, an isolated
village of about 600, is the closest on Earth to the archetype of
traditional polar life. Inuit there hunt seal, beluga, walrus and
narwhal in the icy waters of a fjord.
Every spring, when the midnight sun returns, the Arctic's
treasures, long locked in the ice, are within reach again. On a
freezing-cold June afternoon, narwhal season has begun.
Gedion and Mamarut head out on their sledges, their dogs
racing 35 miles across the glacier, toward the Kristiansens'
ancestral hunting grounds, a narrow strip of sapphire blue in
the distance.
The Kristiansen brothers learned to hunt narwhal from their
father, who, in turn, learned from his own relatives. It won't be
long before Gedion's son, Rasmus, now 6, will be paddling a
kayak beside his father.
Gedion jokes that he lassos narwhals from his kayak like the
American cowboys he has seen on television. A little over a
century ago, the people of Qaanaaq had little contact with the
Western world. Today, they can buy salami and dental floss
and Danish porn magazines in their small local market, and
watch "A Nightmare on Elm Street" in their living rooms on
the one TV station that beams into Qaanaaq.
The Kristiansens also know that other elements travel to their
homeland, riding upon winter winds.
They learned a little about the contaminants — the akuutissat
minguttitsisut — from listening to the radio. But they have not
changed their diet, and no one has advised them to. Virtually
every day, they eat seal meat and muktuk. With every bite,
traces of mercury, PCBs and other chemicals amass in their
bodies, to be passed on to their children.
"We can't avoid them," Gedion said in Greenlandic. "It's our
food."
"It's more than the food you are changing," Wheelersburg said.
"It's the actual catching and hunting of it that really generates
the cultural characteristics." Even skipping one generation
would impair hunting skills, he said, and "once they are lost, I
don't see how you can regenerate them."
Since 2000 BC, the Inuit legacy has been passed on to
generations of boys by generations of men. Their ancestors'
memories, as vivid as a dream, mingle with their own,
inseparable.
Survival of the Fittest
"Qaatuppunga piniartarlunga," Mamarut said.
Like everyone else in Qaanaaq, the Kristiansens remain
mostly oblivious to the scientists and political leaders fretting
about how many parts per billion of toxic chemicals are in
As far back as I can remember, I hunted.