NIEHS investigates Arctic health issues.

Pollution Issues, both issued in 1997, which detailed the unique environmental and health problems facing the Arctic's ecology and populations [see EHP 106:A64-A69 (1998)]. This past May, health and environmental officials, research scientists, medical providers, leaders of indigenous communities, and concerned Arctic citizens met in Anchorage, Alaska, to explore these issues at the International Conference on Arctic Development, Pollution, and Biomarkers of Human Health. At the meeting, organized by the NIEHS and the Alaska Area Native Health Service, Andrew Gilman, director of Health Canada's Office of Sustainable Development, noted that although the AMAP reports described relatively low levels of hazardous substances in the Arctic air, water, and food web compared to other geographic areas, those levels cannot be dismissed as insignificant because of the reliance of indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic on a diet of fish and marine and terrestrial mammals, which ingest and bioaccumulate environmental contaminants such as persistent organic compounds and heavy metals. Addressing conference participants, Gilman said, "The relationship between indigenous people in the Arctic and their food is entirely different from your relationship with a Big Mac." Representatives of indigenous peoples at the conference explained that hunting and fishing and the preparation and consumption of the typical subsistence diet in the Arctic not only meets nutritional needs but is a fundamental component of the peoples' spiritual and cultural life. Thus, environmental threats to the food web are of deep concern, particularly since the isolation of the Arctic area means that indigenous groups have no acceptable alternative to subsistence fishing and hunting. Both Gilman and Arctic residents challenged the environmental health scientists present to develop the tools needed to monitor exposures and effects from environmental contamination in the Arctic. A natural ConneCtiOn. A recent conference nigniighted tne need tor biomarkers of exposure to contaminants in the subsistence diets of indigenous Arctic peoples. This is a difficult challenge. Much of the contamination in the region actually originates in the lower latitudes and is deposited by winds sweeping up over the North Pole. Also, the Arctic human population is small, culturally diverse, and distributed across a vast, harsh geographic area, making it difficult to conduct disease surveillance and monitoring, provide public health prevention services, and deliver health care. Much of the Arctic conference focused on biomarkers under development to measure exposures to pollutants, their effects, and variations in people's susceptibility to such effects. Biomarkers have unlimited potential to clarify …