Circumpolar health workers gather in Nuuk

An international group of health professionals, researchers, administrators and politicians from around the circumpolar world will meet at the 12th International Congress on Circumpolar Health in Nuuk, Greenland, next week.

Hannah Ayukawa, an audiologist or hearing specialist from the Ungava Tulattavik Health Centre will talk about the state of hearing in Nunavik.

“I will be discussing chronic otitis media, that is, ear infections. Associated hearing loss is a frequent problem for many Inuit children in Canada,” Ayukawa said.

Since 1986, trained Inuit technicians have been screening kindergarten kids in Nunavik for hearing problems – and Ayukawa, who is also a member of the board of the Canadian Circumpolar Health Society, is eager to share their results with other health professionals.

For example, the study found that 23 per cent of school-age Inuit children in Kuujjuaraapik had significant hearing loss in one or both ears. In the United States, only about two per cent of children under 18 have hearing loss.

Hearing loss due to otitis media can cause delayed language and speech development. Students may experience difficulties learning and poor academic achievement – at least, that’s what Ayukawa and her team found in Nunavik.

“Hearing loss is associated with poorer academic performance in a second language. We found a similar trend in mathematics, but not in Inuttitut,” Ayukawa said.

These results encouraged several schools under Nunavik’s Kativik School Board to install a special system that amplifies the teachers’ voice for hearing impaired students.

During the Nuuk conference, which ends Sept. 14, sessions and workshops are devoted to a wide variety of health-related issues, including alcohol, smoking, drug abuse, eye and oral health, nutrition, cancer, osteoporosis, child health, violence and sexual abuse.

Dr. Peter Bjerregaard of Denmark’s National Institute of Public Health is the president of the International Union for Circumpolar Health (IUCH), the body that organizes the congress. He said each circumpolar nation has its own particular health interest.

Researchers from Canada and the U.S. concentrate more on the nature and delivery of health services to indigenous peoples, while those from Denmark and Greenland are more concerned with disease and why people fall ill.

Over the past 30 years, Bjerregaard has seen discussions at IUCH meetings evolve. While the first meetings looked at broad topics and infectious diseases, now there’s more talk about illness caused by changes in lifestyle.

The major concern is no longer communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis, which was the great killer in Inuit communities up to the 1950s, but non-communicable and chronic illnesses, such as heart and lung diseases, cancer and diabetes.

Specific subjects on the upcoming meeting’s agenda include mortality in the Kivalliq region, the political economics of oral health care in Nunavut, the creation of an intensive care unit in Arctic Bay, youth sexual behaviour in Nunavut, “crab” asthma in Labrador, the education of community midwives in Nunavik, and semen quality in Greenland.

“I will meet with some people who do the same things I do. This gives me general new ideas. But what’s usually very useful when researchers get together is to compare results and methods,” Bjerregaard said. “Arctic health is such a broad area, and there are so many different topics, that actually so few researchers are interested in each of these many different topics.”

More than 350 participants are expected to attend the IUCH meeting in Nuuk, with 112 from Canada, 161 from Denmark and Greenland and the rest from the U.S., Scandinavia, and Russia.

Every three years since 1967, circumpolar health gatherings have been held in various northern cities. The last gathering was in Harstad, Norway, in June 2000.

This year’s conference is being held in conjunction with the Nuna Med conference, which draws researchers, health workers, administrators, and politicians from Greenland and Denmark.

Among the keynote speakers at the Nuuk conference is Aqqaluk Lynge, vice-president for the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, who will talk about indigenous health.