More than 20 new cases of tuberculosis have been identified in the Nunavut community of Pangnirtung since May, as the territory’s worst tuberculosis outbreak in five years continues. Nunavut’s Department of Health announced Friday that health workers have diagnosed four new cases of active tuberculosis and 18 new latent infections in the Baffin Island settlement of 1,500 in the past three months, bringing the total to 161 cases detected since January. 2021. Patients with active TB are infectious and may suffer from symptoms that include fever, sweats, muscle aches, weight loss, profound fatigue, and wheezing, sometimes coughing up blood. Latent TB infections do not make them sick and are not contagious, but they put them at risk of developing active TB in the future. A Globe and Mail investigation published in June found that frontline nurses at Pangnirtung’s health center called for help last summer as tuberculosis cases piled up and public health officials delayed declaring an epidemic. Public Health Director Michael Patterson and the Nunavut Department of Health declared a tuberculosis outbreak in Pangnirtung on Nov. 25, but declined to say at the time how many cases had been identified in the community. The territorial government continues to argue that releasing TB cases for any of Nunavut’s 25 communities outside the context of an outbreak would risk identifying patients and stigmatizing entire communities. They only disclosed a case count for Pangnirtung in May after The Globe and Mail was reported by the community and after Mayor Eric Lawlor pushed for transparency. The government then agreed to release updates on the Pangnirtung outbreak every three months, which led to the release of new numbers on Friday. Nunavut still refuses to release TB case numbers for other communities. In recent years, tuberculosis rates in Inuit communities have been nearly 300 times higher than rates among non-indigenous people born in Canada. That disparity prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to pledge in 2018 to eliminate bacterial contamination in Inuit communities by 2030. The coronavirus pandemic has drawn attention and effort away from this goal and made it harder to measure progress. The most recent data from the Public Health Service of Canada show that there were 72.2 active cases of tuberculosis per 100,000 population among Inuit in 2020, compared to the national rate of 4.7 cases per 100,000. That’s down significantly from 188.7 cases per 100,000 in 2019 and from a 10-year annual average of 184.14 per 100,000 from 2010 to 2019. But the drop likely reflects TB cases that went undiagnosed in the first year of the pandemic, pandemic experts say he said. Federal Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu recently said her government remains committed to the TB eradication commitment. He urged Nunavut’s Minister of Health and the region’s leading Inuit organization to agree on a TB action plan that would unlock more than $13 million allocated to Ottawa to fight TB in Nunavut in 2018. Our Morning Update and Afternoon Update newsletters are written by Globe editors, giving you a concise summary of the day’s most important headlines. Sign up today.
