Researchers plan telephone survey on environment and health

A research team from the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal and Ontario’s University of Waterloo wants to find out if people in Nunavut can provide clues to understanding the link between the environment and human health.

And six interviewers plan to start calling 5,000 Nunavut households later this month to ask them questions as part of a nation-wide study about this issue.

But interviewers will only be able to conduct their interviews in French and English, said Susan Elliott, a medical geographer at the University of Waterloo and co-investigator of the study.

That’s because of the expense involved in conducting interviews in languages other than French and English, Elliott said.

“That’s a major issue and terrible frustration for us as researchers,” she said.

In other places of Canada with high levels of non-English speakers, such as Vancouver, interviews with people who don’t speak English were not possible either, she said.

When interviewers reach unlingual Inuktitut speakers in Nunavut, they’ll have to apologize and hang up.

“That’s all we can do,” she said.

The data will be used to support policies developed by Health Canada, Elliott said.

“They are very interested in the results of our work and have used the results of our previous study to inform their policies,” she said.

The survey is funded by Health Canada and AllerGen NCE Inc., a national research network dedicated to improving the quality of life for people suffering from allergic and related immune diseases.

In an earlier study undertaken by this research team in 2009, the environment was identified as one of the top three health concerns of Canadians— but the study didn’t reach all sectors of the population, such as low income families aboriginal Canadians and residents of the three territories, Elliott said.

Research increasingly supports the idea that many health conditions, such as food allergies or asthma, may be triggered or made worse by environmental influences.