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Report: Nunavummiut get sick more often, die younger

Want to live long and prosper? Don’t live in Nunavut

JIM BELL

A new national health report paints "a disturbing picture" of Nunavut society, Nunavut Health Minister Ed Picco said this week in a renewed attempt to press Ottawa for more social spending in the territory.

The report’s numbers show that if you want to live a long and healthy life, Nunavut is the worst province or territory to be born in.

"It should be a national embarrassment," Picco said of the information set out in the report, which shows that Nunavummiut get sick more often and die younger than people in any other Canadian jurisdiction.

The document is called the "National Health Performance Indicators Report." All provinces and territories released their own versions of it this week.

At Ottawa’s insistence, provinces and territories agreed two years ago to issue the reports to give Canadians information they can use to hold provincial and territorial officials accountable for the health-care money Ottawa gives them.

Instead, Picco is using the report to slam the federal government for what he says is its neglect of Nunavut’s social and economic conditions.

"It is unacceptable and an embarrassment for a territorial or provincial jurisdiction in a G8 country like Canada to have to acknowledge these shocking statistics," he said, with one eye on the Liberal government’s throne speech earlier this week, and the other on a first minister’s meeting on health care set for the new year.

He called on Ottawa to reinstate a northern, rural and remote housing program, and to change per capita funding methods that provide little help to low-population jurisdictions like Nunavut.

Though most of the raw numbers aren’t new, the report brings them together in a new way — showing how Nunavummiut compare with Canadians in other provinces and territories.

In most categories, Nunavummiut compare poorly. For example, a person born in Nunavut in 1999 can expect to live about 10 years less than the average Canadian, with a life expectancy of 68.6 years, compared with 78.8 years nationally.

The average Canadian woman born in 1999 can expect to live 81.7 years, but the average Nunavut woman born that year can expect to live only 70.2 years.

As in all provinces and territories, women can expect to live longer than men.

The only good news for Nunavummiut is that since 1991, their life expectancy at birth has risen by 1.1 years, similar to the net increase for Canadians in general.

New-born infants in Nunavut die at a rate that’s more than three times higher than the national average. In 1999, Nunavut’s infant mortality rate was 15 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with a national rate of 4.4 infant deaths per live birth.

However, infant mortality rates across Canada have fallen by 20 per cent since 1991, and Nunavut’s infant death rate appears to be falling by a similar rate.

New-born Nunavut babies aren’t as healthy, on average, as other Canadian babies. The numbers show that 35 per cent more infants were born underweight than in the rest of Canada.

Lung cancers are killing Nunavummiut at a rapidly increasing rate, especially in comparison with the rest of Canada.

For each year between 1994 and 1999, Canada’s lung cancer rate was stable, at around 49 or 50 deaths per 100,000.

But in Nunavut, the lung cancer death rate has skyrocketed from 117.8 deaths per 100,000 in 1994-96 to 173.5 deaths per 100,000 in 1997-99.

Lung cancer death rates among Nunavut women are 5.3 times the national average.

But breast cancer rates among Nunavut women are the lowest in the country, though the numbers are difficult to measure.

"This may partly be explained by the higher breast-feeding and fertility rates in Nunavut, both of which have some protective effect against breast cancer," the report says.

Although lung cancer rates are higher among men than women in Nunavut, the overall cancer rate among Nunavut women is higher.

Sylvia Healey, an epidemiologist with Nunavut’s health department, said that’s because cervical cancer rates are very high among women in Nunavut. Thirty-five per cent of cancers diagnosed in women in Nunavut are cancers of the cervix.

Since cervical cancers are believed to be caused by a sexually transmitted papiloma virus, Healey says this is likely a sign of unprotected sexual activity.

That’s also reflected in sky-high rates of genital chlamydia in Nunavut, which have been increasing since 1991.

In 2000, chlamydia, a disease that causes infertility and ectopic pregnancies in women, occurred among Nunavut women at a rate that’s 17 times higher than the national average, and 18 times higher among Nunavut men.

But at the same time, HIV infections are extremely low. Since 1995, no one in Nunavut has been diagnosed with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

But health officials say that’s no reason to be complacent, since there may be many Nunavut residents who have never been tested for HIV.

Tuberculosis, on the other hand, is re-emerging in Nunavut with a vengeance, at a rate that’s 17 times higher than the Canadian average.

Dr. Sandy Macdonald, Nunavut’s director of medical affairs and telehealth, says that’s because TB is a disease of poverty.

"People who have a roof over their head, three square meals a day, and a job don’t get TB," Macdonald said.

Many of the recent TB cases in Nunavut are "re-activated," health officials say, meaning that they occur among people who were sick many years ago and who are getting sick again as they age.

Cardiovascular disease, which was once unknown among Inuit, is still lower in Nunavut than in the rest of Canada, but the numbers show that it’s now increasing, as more Inuit adopt Western food and sedentary ways of living.

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