Though the report is full of encouraging hints, such declining levels of toxic substances such as DDTs and PCBs in seal blubber, a variety of interpretations have been given the federal study's conclusions.

Mary Sillet, president of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, told Nunatsiaq News that "the food on which Inuit depend is still safe to eat."

One of the Tapirisat's researchers, however, offered a less comforting take: "As the research stands now, unborn babies are the only population at any real risk," Craig Boljkovac said in an interview with News/North.

And in southern media, the messages have been just as mixed. Norm Snow, head of the Inuvialuit Game Council in Inuvik, recently told the British weekly magazine New Scientist that previous research has led to troubling conclusions about diets that include beluga and narwhal.

"Eat about 10 grams of muktuk -- that's a piece the size of a sugar cube -- and you've had the maximum weekly intake of PCBs as recommended by the Canadian health authorities. But many people here regularly eat a hundred times that," Snow said.

The federal government has in the past advised women of child-bearing age to eat less marine mammal and caribou fat.

The GNWT, however is still advising women through leaflets and videos that muktuk and blubber are good sources of nutrition.

(Fat is where the toxins, some of which are suspected of causing birth defects and other problems, tend to build up. Meat and fish hold much lower levels of the contaminants and are considered safe to eat.)

The task of making common sense -- and public policy -- out of the science in the North falls to Dr. Andre Corriveau, medical officer for the GNWT.

"We feel that although there are some worrisome concerns related to the contaminants issue in fatty tissues of marine mammals ... at this point in time, a shift away from them could be disastrous." he said in an interview.

But Corriveau added that the problem is much more complex than that. He agrees that "if there are (negative) health effects, in infants is where we're going to find them," he said.

Because young Northerners already tend to eat relatively little traditional foods, the benefits of avoiding them are probably insignificant. And then there's the danger young people will turn to junk food to replace country foods, a situation that brings another set of health problems.

Corriveau said he is reluctant to issue harsh warnings, in part because it may be too late to do any good.

The worst of the contamination problem is probably already past, he said, because toxins such as PCBs and DDTs were banned in North America decades ago. That means Northerners now in their 20s and 30s could be the last generation with high levels of contaminants in their bodies.

"The problem is we started to look too late."

Not all research is pointing in that direction, however. Because of the way air and water currents circulate from the tropics, where many of the suspect chemicals are still in use, to the Arctic, contamination continues to build in some regions. In the High Arctic, for example, concentrations of PCBs are still rising.

The bottom line for Corriveau is that "it's too early to turn away from country foods in general and when we talk about the fat of marine mammals and blubber, I'm still not ready to advise turning away."

Studies by both American and Canadian scientists are under way in hopes of finding better evidence on which to base health recommendations. But

whether the advice gets translated into government policy is another matter.

When people's heath and their culture are at stake, politics is almost always a factor, concedes Corriveau. "It's like everything else"