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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

A beached fishing boat in Kimmirut serves as an improvised children’s playground.
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

He thought twice before joining the research team. The C. D. Howe experience left deep scars in the collective memory that have yet to heal. “I wasn’t born at the time, but I have witnessed the devastation caused by the disappearances,” says the 49-year-old. “I was immediately assured, however, that this health survey would be different.”

Egeland visited several communities to explain her project in person, and Inuit supported it in droves. About 2,500 participants visited the Amundsen’s floating research clinic in 2007 and 2008 to have a complete physical exam, including blood tests and, for some, bone-density scans and cardiac ultrasounds. They then spent nearly two hours answering questions from interviewers like Onalik, who, as a group, spoke all three of the region’s Inuktitut dialects.

“It was a golden opportunity,” says Iqaluit Mayor, Elisapee Sheutiapik, in her city hall office. “Community clinics are modestly equipped; the arrival of the ship gave us the opportunity to undergo tests that are not normally available here.”

Sheutiapik says she was sold on the project as soon as she heard about the earlier study in Nunavik. As president of the Nunavut Association of Municipalities, she convinced her counterparts of the importance of contributing to Egeland’s survey. In 2007, Sheutiapik travelled to Sanikiluaq to join the field team that visited each community before the ship’s arrival. They explained the project to residents and invited families, whose names had been chosen at random, to participate.

“From the first village, in Sanikiluaq, when the time came to gather people on the beach and bring them to the Amundsen, we ended up with more people than we had on our lists,” she says in a burst of laughter. “Everyone wanted to be on board.”

In each community, the team aimed for and obtained a participation rate of 10 percent of the population. “Sometimes we went into homes to explain the project and were refused,” says Diane McGlade, a nurse in Iqaluit who was a member of the field crew. “But when the boat arrived and a few people had undergone their exam on board, families came over to tell us that they had changed their mind.”

Born in Ontario, McGlade began her career at the hospital in Iqaluit 27 years ago. She works there still, organizing clinics with specialists — ears, nose and throat doctors, gynecologists and cardiologists — who see their Inuit patients only occasionally. “When I started here, we never saw an Inuk suffering from diabetes or cardiovascular disease,” she recalls. “Things began to change a few years after my arrival.”

By choosing southern food over food off the land and gradually abandoning hunting expeditions for a more sedentary lifestyle, Inuit have become susceptible to illnesses that until recently rarely affected them. Traditional Inuit food is full of “healthy fats,” while southern fare is replete with saturated fats. Caribou, seal and polar bear meat and fish are rich sources of unsaturated fatty acids, such as omega-3, with proven benefits for maintaining a healthy heart. “Hunting and fishing are also excellent forms of exercise,” says McGlade, an avid caribou hunter who routinely gives meat to elders who can no longer travel on the land to provide for themselves.

The results of the Nunavik survey show that in 2004, six out of 10 adults were overweight (30 percent) or obese (28 percent). That’s a jump from 1992, when 41 percent of the adult population carried extra weight and 19 percent was obese. The proportion of Inuit with high blood pressure also rose, from 6 percent in 1992 to 12 percent in 2004. These figures concern Laval’s Dewailly. “Combined with other factors, such as smoking,” he says, “it is clear that Inuit are facing serious problems.”

Nevertheless, in 2004 nearly half of Nunavik’s Inuit residents said they hunted at least once a week over the course of two seasons. Not surprisingly, older survey respondents were more interested in the hunt than younger participants.