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January/February 2010 issue	In this issue Table of Contents IPY: What is IPY? IPY: Kluane research station IPY: Inuit health IPY: Arctic mercury mystery IPY: Arctic scientist IPY: Future Arctic research IPY: Multimedia The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic Book Reviews

The largest study on Inuit health in Canada takes the pulse of a people afflicted with illnesses uncommon — until recently — in the North.
Photo: Benoit Aquin

• PHOTO ESSAY
• VIDEO
• INTERACTIVE

Inuit health: Meet the people and communities taking part in the checkup

Melting lands: An Inuit community strives to keep its traditions
Altered life: More about changing traditions part 1, part 2 and part 3

Living with change: Discover more about the Inuit and IPY

Grace Egeland knew she was embarking on a delicate mission. The last time a ship had criss-crossed the Canadian Arctic to conduct health surveys, hundreds of Inuit had been taken away from their families, never to return. It was the 1950s, at the height of a tuberculosis epidemic that killed more than 250 Inuit. The federal government dispatched the C. D. Howe, a Canadian Coast Guard vessel converted into a roving medical clinic, to screen the sick. Thousands were moved to sanatoriums in Hamilton, Montréal, Québec and other cities, without being given a chance to say goodbye. To this day, many of their families don’t know where they were taken, whether they subsequently died and, if so, where they were buried.

Relatively recent health concerns, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, are having devastating effects among northerners. Yet Egeland, who is also a researcher with McGill’s Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment, says there is still time to make a difference. “With this survey,” she says, “we wanted to discover the factors that contribute to these new health problems and to learn how they can be prevented.”

Click map to enlarge

The concept isn’t new. In 2004, the Amundsen toured the 14 villages of Nunavik (northern Quebec) for a similar research project. Éric Dewailly, a professor and epidemiologist at Université Laval in Québec and a co-director of the Nasivvik Centre for Inuit Health and Changing Environments, led that survey, simply titled Qanuippitaa? How are we? The last time data had been collected on the health of Inuit communities in Nunavik was in 1992.

Egeland launched Qanuqitpit? Qanuippitali? Kanuivit? How about us? How are we? (in three Inuktitut dialects) to study communities in the rest of the Canadian Arctic, for which no specific Inuit health data had ever been compiled.

Paul Onalik still proudly wears a vest sporting the healthsurvey logo when I meet him in September 2009 on the edge of the bay in Kimmirut, a hamlet of 411 planted in the tundra on southern Baffin Island. Egeland’s team had left the Arctic nearly a year ago and was still collating the survey results, which will be released later this year. But the survey participants had already received their personal health assessments and were following up, if necessary, with their local medical clinics.

Onalik works at the Kimmirut airport, a small corrugatedsteel building barely bigger than a bungalow. He radioes weather information to the pilots of Kenn Borek Air, who come in from Iqaluit four times a week, landing their Twin Otters on the gravelly airstrip. For two summers, however, Onalik took a break from his airport duties to board the Amundsen and work with Egeland as an interviewer, asking fellow Inuit from one end of the Arctic to the other about their eating habits and way of life.