Nunavik’s public health department issues TB alert

Infections of the germs which cause tuberculosis, shown here in a magnified image, can lead to death in infected people — if they don’t receive a course of antibiotic treatment. (FILE PHOTO)

Nunavik is experiencing a serious outbreak of tuberculosis, judging from a news release sent out late May 9 from Nunavik’s public health department where officials are asking for help from Nunavimmiut to prevent the spread of TB.

The new release said contagious tuberculosis cases have been detected “within certain communities of the region” although the situation appears to be “relatively well under control, with the exception of a single community,” which was not named.

Health workers at Kuujjuaq’s Tulattavik hospital and the Inuulitsivik in Puvirinituq are diagnosing and treating Nunavimmiut found to have active TB as well those in contact with infected people, the release said.

And it it warned people to stay away from houses “in which gambling and drug sharing occur (gathering houses), where several individuals spend long hours in overcrowded and poorly ventilated environments.”

These houses constitute “a major risk for the transmission of tuberculosis,” it said.

Young people are often affected, and they tend to delay attendance at the local health clinic in spite of symptoms that suggest TB, it said.

TB is an infectious disease that usually affects the lungs, although all other organs may be involved.

If untreated, the disease can be fatal.

TB preys on people whose general well-being is already weakened by poor diet, smoking and alcohol abuse. Crowded housing also encourages the spread of the disease.

According to the World Health Organization, each person with active TB can infect 10 to 15 people a year on average.

Most people infected with the tuberculosis bacillus, or germ, don’t become ill or even know they are infected because germ can lie dormant in a person’s lungs for many years.

But, without treatment, TB can eventually kill by gradually eating away at the lungs or, in rare cases, by spreading to other organs.

In Nunavik, the TB rate has been much lower than in Nunavut and much closer to the Canadian rate, according to past figures from Nunavik’s public health department.

Nunavik had managed to reduce its numbers dramatically through intensive screening and vaccination efforts, and the region only recorded 44 cases of TB between 2000 and 2006, and only 54 up to 2007.

Those figures include 12 patients treated during an outbreak in 2007 in Kangiqsualujjuaq.

Despite localized outbreaks, the TB rate dropped so much in Nunavik that health workers in 2008 no longer screened for TB: screenings found few infections that hadn’t already been detected by other means.

Nunavik no longer vaccinated for TB either, because some Nunavik residents had suffered bad reactions to the vaccine.

One way to diagnose TB is by performing a simple skin test to see if a person has developed a hypersensitivity to the TB germ.

Medication can then prevent infected people from developing full-blown symptoms of TB.

Doctors are testing four-month treatments to see if these work.

But, for now if you have latent or sleeping TB infection, you’ll be taking one medication for nine months.

And active cases of TB require treatment with a combination of four drugs for six months.