Did lack of dog teams cause sickness?

I came to Nunavut in 1959 and at that time I ran into a lot of Inuit who had just returned from a lengthy stay in a southern hospital recovering from tuberculosis.

No matter what community I worked in it was the same thing — lives seemed to have changed in some way. There did not seem to be the amount of food around that there used to be and I heard stories of people being hungry.

I imagine this happened in the early 1950s. It now makes me wonder if not having dog teams was the cause of so much sickness.

Bill Hughes
Arctic Bay
bhughes.ab@polarland.com