Nunavut health officials keep an eye out for Ebola

The Ebola virus: the Centres for Disease Control colourized this image of a magnified Ebola virus. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CDC)

CAMBRIDGE BAY — You might think that the deadly virus Ebola would generate little interest in a community like Cambridge Bay, located above the Arctic Circle, nearly 1,000 kilometres north of Yellowknife on Victoria Island.

But many in this western Nunavut town of 1,700 — from students at Kiilinik High School to Friday night patrons of the Ikalututiak Elks Club — worry about Ebola and whether their future could also include imposed quarantines and the hazmat suits they see in the news or even sickness and death.

This past August, the Nunavut health department said the risk of Ebola to people living in the territory remained “very low.”

That’s when the virus — a severe and generally fatal disease that causes haemorrhagic fever in humans and animals — was still confined to West Africa.

But the risk in Nunavut continues to remain “low, as it also is in Canada as a whole,” Nunavut’s acting chief medical officer of health, Dr. Geraldine Osborne, said Oct. 14 in an email communication. “To date there have been no cases of Ebola in Canada.”

“I would like to reassure Nunavummiut that the risk of coming into contact with Ebola virus disease is very, very low for people in Nunavut. However, because this is such a serious illness we need to have plans in place despite the low risk,” Osborne said.

“I would also like to reiterate that this infection is not spread by casual contact, it requires direct contact with the body fluids of a person who is sick with Ebola virus disease.”

The Government of Nunavut does have an Ebola contingency plan, she said, but this does not call for isolating Nunavut from air connections with southern Canada.

That’s different than the Nunavik regional health board’s “regional preventive isolation” plan, developed in response to the 2008 H1N1 bird flu scare.

Under that plan, air travel within Nunavik would continue, but if an outbreak hits a particular community, all travel to and from the affected community would cease.

And, among other measures, if airline passengers from Nunavik travel south during a pandemic, they would not be able to return without first spending time in quarantine.

But Osborne said preventive isolation would not be relevant for Ebola. That’s because the mode of transmission is different from that of the flu, “which is an airborne infection,” adding again that Ebola is spread by direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person who has symptoms of the disease.

However, as of Oct. 10, when the death toll for the virus rose above 4,000 worldwide, Canada started to institute airport screening of passengers arriving from West Africa, to prevent Ebola’s spread.

But could the virus reach the Arctic?

Researchers who used models to look at interactions between pathogens and hosts for their 2006 study concluded that due to increasing global transportation, human beings may suffer large pandemics or even become extinct —”unless preventive actions are taken that either limit global transportation or its impact.”

Game players on a gaming forum say when they slotted Ebola in a game called Plague Inc., Greenland turned out to be only place on Earth to be spared contagion.

Yet that game may not have taken into account the fact Ebola can survive in low temperatures, according to information on the website for Canada’s public health agency: the Ebola virus can survive in liquid or dried material for several days on contaminated surfaces, particularly at temperatures as low of 4 C and indefinitely stable at temperatures as low as -70 C.

The Spanish flu virus, which led to the 1918 flu world pandemic, also thrived in the Arctic. It infected more than 500 million people around the world, including in the Arctic, where some Inupiat villages in Alaska saw 85 per cent of their people die.

Ebola is considered to be more deadly with a death rate of around 70 per cent, the WHO says. But Ebola remains much less contagious than the flu, SARS or the measles.

As for how the federal government plans to cope with Ebola, Public Health Canada has already asked territories and local public health authorities to create guidelines to support front-line health workers.

“We are also helping industry to decide on the appropriate measures for airports, [and] airplanes,” the agency said.