Pristine No More.

• Author: Johansen, Bruce E.

The Arctic, where mother's milk is toxic

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a forty-seven-year-old grandmother in an Inuit community in remote northern Quebec. She worries about the fate of the 140,000 Inuits in Canada's Arctic because they have unwittingly absorbed toxic chemicals from polluters thousands of miles to the south. These chemicals are accumulating at alarmingly high levels in the mother's milk of Inuit women.

"As we put our babies to our breasts, we are feeding them a noxious, toxic cocktail," said Watt-Cloutier recently. "When women have to think twice about breast-feeding their babies, surely that must be a wake-up call to the world."

The due bills for modern industry are being left on the Inuits' table in Nunavut, the Canadian Arctic. Inuits on Broughton Island have the highest levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) ever found, except among victims of industrial accidents.

Because of their diet of contaminated sea animals and fish, Inuit women have six times the level of PCBs in their breast milk as women in urban Quebec, reports the Quebec Health Center.

PCBs and other toxins accumulate across generations in mammals, including the Inuit and many of their food sources. Airborne toxic substances are absorbed by plankton and small fish, which are then eaten by dolphins, whales, and other large animals. The mammals' thick, subcutaneous fat stores the hazardous sub stances, which then are transmitted to offspring through breast-feeding. According to the Quebec Health Center, a concentration of 1,052 parts per billion of PCBs has been found in Arctic women's breast fat. This compares to a reading of 7,002 in polar bear fat, 1,002 in whale blubber, 527 in seal blubber, and 152 in fish. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) safety standard for edible poultry, by contrast, is three parts per billion, and in fish two parts per billion. At fifty parts per billion, soil is often considered to be hazardous waste.

Inuit infants are providing a living test case for immunologists. Because of their rapid growth and development, fetuses, infants, and children may be more sensitive to dioxin exposure than other groups. Born with depleted white blood cells, the children suffer excessive bouts of diseases, including a twenty-fold increase in life-threatening meningitis compared to other Canadian children, the Quebec Health Center found. The children's immune systems are so impaired that they sometimes fail to produce enough antibodies to...