Photo: Pulling out the big guns to fight TB

World-renowned Canadian health advocate Stephen Lewis, left, tries country food for the first time with Ottawa Hospital tuberculosis researcher Dr. Gonzalo Alvarez during a community feast hosted by Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. in Iqaluit Sept. 6. One-time deputy executive director of UNICEF and Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Lewis is co-founder and co-director of the advocacy organization AIDS-Free World which works to decrease AIDS and TB. Lewis is now in Igloolik where he will be gathering information about TB among northern Indigenous peoples. Lewis met with elders while in Iqaluit who told him of loved ones with TB whisked away to southern hospitals in the 1950s and 1960s. “The way in which the lives of families were uprooted and destroyed and to this day, there are many people in Nunavut who don’t know where their fathers or mothers are buried, don’t even know the year in which they died.” He called this an “ugly episode” in Canadian history, saying, “I hope to make Canadians aware of the injustice that has been done.” Lewis will return to Iqaluit on Sept. 9 for a news conference. (PHOTO BY BETH BROWN)