Downstream disease
Urban agriculture: coming soon to a backyard near you?
Graeme McElheran
Photography by ISTOCKPHOTO: Christa Brunt
Tova Crane was 12 years old when she went temporarily blind. “I woke up one morning and I just couldn’t see,” she recalls. She woke up again while doctors were giving her insulin. The vision loss only lasted the night, but she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. The doctors said she had developed it because she was overweight, but Crane blames stress; as a Cree kid growing up on Alberta’s Samson First Nation reserve, south of Edmonton, she had plenty to worry about.
However, both Crane and her doctors might be misplacing the blame for her diabetes. New Korean research on U.S. data is showing a correlation between exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs), such as dioxins released from pulp and paper mills or found in flame retardants, and insulin resistance, something that leads to Type 2 diabetes. This link might explain why Canada’s Aboriginals, who often live a subsistence lifestyle downstream from industrial developments, are three to five times more likely than the general population to contract this disease.
While there is no hard proof that POPs caused Crane’s diabetes, Samson’s well water did go bad several years ago after seismic crews started drilling nearby for oil and gas. “There’s gas in our wells now and all kinds of stuff in our water,” points out Crane, now 20.
A study published in the January 2008 Lancet was the first to report on the overlooked connection between diabetes and environmental pollution. “Some chemicals disrupt the ability of the body to metabolize fats directly, thereby inducing symptoms, such as weight gain, that can lead to diabetes,” report the authors.
The article cites several studies of how POPs cause resistance to insulin, noting that traditional research into diabetes has focused on genetics and the “westernization of dietary habits and lifestyles,” while ignoring this link between POPs and insulin. There’s no proof of a causal link between the pollutants and diabetes, but the authors suggest that’s because the possibility has been overlooked. “The public-health implications of such an association could be substantial.”
To get a sense of how substantial, consider that Canada’s 737 recognized Aboriginal communities are virtually all within the watershed of an industrial development, be it factory, mill or mine, all of which are legally releasing pollutants.
“If you look at First Nations coast to coast for communities that fish downstream from or in the vicinity of pulp and paper mills, it works out to roughly a quarter of all First Nations in the country,” says activist John Hummel, who has been researching links between toxic substances and the effects on the health of First Nations peoples as part of the Kahnawake Environment Office’s Research for Health Project. “That’s just for pulp and paper mills. Most of these pulp mills released dioxins, furans and other POPs for many decades.”
Scientists could figure out if there’s a correlation between POPs and diabetes, but as the Lancet study notes, “Few laboratories seem willing to commit resources to the long-term longitudinal studies needed for such investigations.”
But with Health Canada predicting that by 2019 more than a quarter of Canada’s million Aboriginals will have Type 2 diabetes, it’s a link that warrants investigation.
