Karen Mackenzie
Northern News Services
Monday, July 9, 2007

IQALUIT - The most comprehensive study of Inuit health to date will launch next month aboard the Coast Guard ship Amundsen.

Teams of medical personnel will survey about 1,200 Inuit in 19 communities in the Baffin and Kivalliq regions this August and September.

Testing will continue in six Kitikmeot communities and Baker Lake in 2008.

"This will give us really valuable baseline information on the health status of the population in Nunavut, which is something we really don’t have a lot of right now," said Geraldine Osborne, deputy chief medical officer of health for Nunavut.

Adult volunteers will be tested aboard the ship for diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and risk of stroke.

Volunteers between three and five years old will be tested by land teams for issues like vitamin-deficiency, vision, diet and health history.

The randomly selected survey participants will also be questioned about their general lifestyle, home crowding and food security.

"This is information that will help guide preventative measures in the future," said Grace Egeland, the principal investigator for the survey, from McGill University.

"Really the Inuit have been protected from both heart disease and diabetes, in part due to traditional diet, and we’re noticing it going up," she said.

"We want to learn what has been protecting Inuit from the diseases in the past, and how we can use this information to help protect them in the future. It’s not too late to deal with the situation before it gets worse."

Interviews and tests will be co-ordinated in advance by community research assistants in each hamlet, such as Eva Alainga in Iqaluit.

"Basically I’ll be going to as many homes as I possibly can, trying to get as many participants as I can," Alainga said.

The Inuktitut speaker is one of about 40 bilingual staff involved in the project.

She piloted the test surveys last month in Iqaluit, and said she got a generally good response from those she interviewed.

"I guess towards more of the personal questions, I think some people will opt not to answer, and it’s totally up to them," she said.

"The different dialects - I think that will be a little challenging," she said. "But we’re all looking forward to this. I’d want to know what my health is going to be like in the future, too."

The other challenge the team faces is the stigma attached to medical ships in the territory.

"The last time a major ship came into these communities to test people, it was for TB, and people were shipped out south. Many of them never came back," Gee said, referring to the C.D. Howe, which removed tuberculosis-affected residents from the communities in the 1950s and 1960s.

"The elders would remember that, and might have worries."

Community liaison assistants were provided with Inuktitut DVDs and other materials, and are encouraged to meet with elders "to speak with them, to inform them that this is not the same as the C.D. Howe," Egeland said.

Individual results will be given to participants within two to four months of the testing.

"But this is not meant to be a replacement for regular physical check-ups," Egeland said.

If any major individual health problems are identified during the survey, the participant will be given a letter of referral and directed to the local health centre, according to Osborne.

The $10.6-million project is a collaboration of all three levels of government, the universities of McGill and Toronto and the Centre for Indigenous People’s Nutrition and Environment, with support from regional Inuit associations, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. and Embrace Life.