No plans for TB screening clinic in Pond Inlet despite outbreak

Updated Aug. 2 at 5:20 p.m.

There are “no immediate plans” for a tuberculosis screening clinic in Pond Inlet where an outbreak is ongoing, despite Nunavut’s Health Department having run clinics in Pangnirtung and Naujaat.

“The sense is that as long as we are able to follow every case, and every contact, that there’s [likely] not a lot of added value to do a community-wide screening,” Dr. André Corriveau, the territory’s acting chief public health officer, said Friday.

He noted in outbreaks like those in Pangnirtung and Naujaat where the disease is showing up in people with no known exposure or link to an infected person, there is more of an urgency for broad community screening.

Pond Inlet is different, he said, in that new cases are following a predictable pattern of being transmitted from known carriers to people they have been in contact with. The approach in Pond Inlet is more “systematic.”

Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection that primarily affects the respiratory system. People with active cases show symptoms — a cough that lasts longer than three weeks, fatigue, loss of appetite, fever or night sweats — and are contagious.

People infected with latent TB are not contagious and don’t show symptoms. But left untreated, latent infections can become active and infectious.

It has been more than a year since a TB outbreak was declared in Pond Inlet on March 17, 2023.

The Health Department screened 892 individuals during a six-week community-wide screening in Naujaat in April. That is 90 per cent of the department’s goal to screen 1,000 people in the hamlet with a population of approximately 1,200 people, the department announced in July at the end of the clinic.

The department also ran a six-week community-wide screening in Pangnirtung in fall 2023.

TB outbreaks have been declared in all three hamlets in the past several years. Pangnirtung’s outbreak was declared in November 2021, and Pond Inlet’s was declared in March 2023.

On Thursday, Nunavut’s Department of Health warned the public that tuberculosis outbreaks in all three hamlets are ongoing.

The department released updated numbers for active and latent cases for each community.

Pond Inlet’s outbreak was declared March 17, 2023, with five active and 22 latent cases; there now have been 12 active and 106 latent cases reported in that community of about 1,500 residents.

In Naujaat, an outbreak was declared May 16, 2023. At that time the Department of Health reported six active cases and 10 latent cases; the total as of Thursday is 23 active cases and 153 latent cases reported in the hamlet.

The territorial government never reported how many active and latent cases there were in Pangnirtung when an outbreak was declared there on Nov. 25, 2021. Total reported cases now sit at 48 active and 278 latent in the community of about 1,500 people.

The majority of people in those communities with latent TB have undergone or are undergoing treatment, the announcement said. More than half of those diagnosed with active TB are still undergoing treatment.

Tuberculosis can become dangerous if left untreated.

Anyone with tuberculosis symptoms should go to a health centre as soon as possible, the Department of Health said.

Note: This article was updated to include comments from an interview with Dr. André Corriveau