COLUMN ONE : In Arctic, a Toxic Surprise : Villagers appear to be packing toxins into their bodies faster than people in temperate, polluting zones. Chemicals, brought in by currents and winds, magnify in the food chain.

There are no factory whistles splitting the air here in Broughton Island, 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Indeed, there are no factories at all, no time clocks to punch, no smokestacks silhouetted against the enormous, empty skies of Canada’s far north.

The largest “industry” in town is a sewing circle, housed in a one-room, pre-fab building where women fashion hand-made parkas out of the glossy gray pelts of caribou.

Here, about 450 Eskimos--they call themselves Inuit, or “the people”--live by hunting and fishing, much as their ancestors have done for thousands of years. Their language, Inuktitut, fittingly has no word for contamination. Fittingly, but perhaps not for much longer.

Broughton Island is the last place on Earth one would associate with chemical hazards. Yet this remote, hardscrabble village is paying the price of the comfortable, industrialized lives lived far away in the south, even many thousands of miles distant. In 1989, the villagers learned that they have higher levels of PCBs in their blood than any known population on Earth, excluding the victims of industrial accidents. Scientists found one Broughton Islander with a PCB intake five times the maximum acceptable dose.

“They said it was dangerous, but how dangerous?” asks Broughton Island Mayor Lootie Toomasie, who has been waiting in vain for an answer to his question. Two years after the researchers brought their bad news to his village and then departed, Toomasie complains that no one has been able to tell him conclusively about the long-term effects of PCBs on his people’s health.

The worried villagers of Broughton Island aren’t alone in their plight. All across the vast, barren Arctic, scientists are turning up surprising concentrations of pesticides, herbicides and industrial compounds used in the south, some of them banned years ago in Canada and the United States.

The chemicals migrate here on the Earth’s long-range air and water currents, some from as far off as Southeast Asia. The laborious process of pinpointing their sources--and eventually putting a stop to their spread--is only now beginning.

In Canada and some of the other countries whose dominion stretches northward toward the Pole, contamination in the Arctic has begun to move from esoteric concern to environmental insult. In Ottawa, the government this year earmarked $87 million for Arctic environmental research and cleanup.

In Finland, the eight so-called circumpolar nations--Canada, the United States, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Soviet Union--signed the first of a series of groundbreaking multilateral protocols on Arctic pollution last week.

Officials involved in these initiatives hasten to note that their worries do not stem from any new, sky-high levels of toxins found in the soils or water of the north. On the contrary, background readings for hazardous substances in the Arctic are generally well below those for the industrialized southern latitudes.

Magnifying Effect

What has lately concentrated the attention of the scientific community is, instead, the way the relatively low levels of contaminants in northern winds and waters are magnifying themselves billions of times in the Arctic food chain, and the glaringly unjust result: The simple hunting societies of the Arctic, people who have tasted precious few of the comforts of industry and mechanized agriculture, appear to be packing toxins into their bodies at a faster rate than the people of the world’s pampered, polluting, temperate zones.

To many competent observers, the degradation of the far north is an astonishing violation of the rightness of things.

“People up here lead a pretty harsh existence, but over the years they were at least able to count on clean air, clean water, clean land and clean wildlife,” says Kevin Lloyd, director of wildlife management for the Northwest Territories government in Yellowknife. “Now, we know this really is Spaceship Earth, and there is no part of the world that is immune from activity in other parts.”

Until recently, little was known about chemical contamination in the north. Scientists had found DDT and PCBs in the tissue of Arctic animals as early as the late 1960s, but there was no appreciable effort to coordinate the investigations. The findings attracted little attention and resulted in almost no follow-up.

“No one considered it to be that important,” recalls Derek Muir, a research scientist at the Canadian government’s Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg. “No one was thinking about human consumption (of tainted animals).”

DEW Line Spills

But that changed in 1984 when the Canadian government dispatched a team of investigators to check for chemical spills at five abandoned Distant Early Warning, or DEW Line, stations. There had originally been 42 DEW Line sites in Canada, built jointly by the Canadian and U.S. governments in the 1950s, to scan the skies for the first hints of a Soviet strategic strike mounted from over the Pole. When listening technology improved in the early 1960s, about half the stations were decommissioned.

“They just got up, walked out the door and went away,” says Garth Bangay of Canada’s Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, who managed the investigation of the junk left behind at the stations.

Not surprisingly, his teams found rusting old drums of sludge and solvents, all manner of electrical equipment, and potent concentrations of the PCBs used to insulate the electrical hardware of the era. (PCB--polychlorinated biphenyls--are a family of more than 200 related organic compounds. Some are harmless, while others are extremely toxic and have been linked with diseases of the blood, immune and nervous systems, with respiratory and skin problems, and with underweight and premature babies. The use of PCBs has been banned in North America since the late 1970s.)

Bangay’s investigators also sampled fish caught around the sites, and found PCBs in their flesh. That triggered widespread concern, for it seemed to suggest that the DEW Line stations were leaking their PCBs into Arctic waters. Scientists began a number of studies to see if there might be a line of 21 chemical hot spots crossing northern Canada where the DEW stations once stood.

But as the research progressed, the investigators began to realize that the abandoned DEW Line sites were the least of their worries. The contamination couldn’t possibly be leaching from the husks of the military outposts alone, they concluded; there were too many pollutants, and the chemicals were far too widely dispersed across the Arctic.

Food Chains Studied

At the Freshwater Institute, for instance, Muir, with Ross Norstrum of the Canadian National Wildlife Research Center, began to study Arctic food chains in the wake of the DEW Line discovery.

“We looked not just for PCBs and DDT, but for almost every other organochlorine we could think of,” Muir says. (Organochlorines are a large class of industrial and agricultural chemicals--including PCBs--that do not break down easily in the environment and which instead tend to accumulate in the fatty tissues of animals.)

And they found them: not just PCBs and DDT, but also dioxins, the pesticides HCH, toxaphene and chlordane--and other chemicals, all of them dangerous and many of them severely restricted in North America.

“There was quite a biomagnification going on,” says Muir, explaining that most Arctic marine mammals are thickly padded with fat for insulation and thus accumulate organochlorines in their bodies far more readily than the leaner animals living on land. By the time PCBs move from the waters of the Arctic Ocean into the tiny, one-celled animals at the bottom of the food chain, from there into the flesh of cod and other fish, then into seals, and finally on up to the polar bears that eat the seals, their concentration has increased about 3 billion times.

As the research continued, Muir began to focus on seals. Working with Inuit hunters across the Canadian Arctic, he collected meat samples and found that the degree of contamination was the same, whether the seals had been killed near an abandoned DEW Line station or on a lonely ice floe far from the works of man. That led him to conclude that the chemicals were traveling into the Arctic from afar.

Norstrum, who concentrated on polar bears, found much the same thing.

“It’s all dominated by the long-range transport phenomenon,” he says.

Organochlorines, it turns out, are great travelers. Wherever they are spilled or sprayed, a sizable percentage evaporates into the atmosphere and rides the winds for hundreds or thousands of miles. When the airborne chemicals hit a cold spot and condense, they return to the Earth’s surface--but usually just for a time.

If they don’t enter the food chain where they alight, they simply evaporate again, potent as ever, the next time their resting place heats up. Then off they go again on the wind, for another few hundred miles.

“It’s the grasshopper effect,” says Andy Gilman, chief of the Canadian government’s Great Lakes health effects program. “(The contamination) is just sort of leaping its way north, because that’s the direction of the upper air currents.”

Grim Outlook

All of which looked grim indeed for the Inuit.

“It’s the predator at the top that usually takes the lumps,” says Bangay. “We saw what happened in the United States with the bald eagle, at the top of its food chain. (The eagle accumulated DDT from its prey, and lost its capacity to lay viable eggs.) Well, in the Arctic, man is the ultimate predator.”

The Inuit not only live primarily on fish, seals, whales, polar bears and the like--a diet called “country food” in the north--but they generally consider the fattiest parts the best. However implausible it may sound to an outsider today, in the age of the fiber revolution, nutritionists say the fatty Inuit diet contains all the nutrients a northerner needs.

And the fats found in Arctic fish and blubber are chemically very different from the fats found in hamburgers or potato chips, and may actually protect the Inuit from heart disease and other common southern afflictions.

Even if they wanted to overhaul their diet and eat like southerners, the Inuit would have great difficulty doing so. Although there are general stores in Canadian Inuit hamlets today, all the food is flown in--there are no roads or even natural land bridges leading out from these parts--and that takes the cost of a quart of milk to $4, or a battered head of lettuce to $3. A tiny frozen turkey the size of a stewing hen approaches $40 in the Arctic.

It ‘Never Melts’

Of all the Inuit hamlets in northern Canada today, it is Broughton Island that consumes the most marine mammals. Its people live on a small, rugged island in the frigid waters of the Davis Strait. To the east, across the shifting ice, lies Greenland; to the west is a desolate wilderness of jagged, fog-shrouded peaks whose Inuktitut name translates as “the land that never melts.”

Broughton Islanders go to great lengths to hunt caribou on the mainland, but the chemical-rich seals, narwhals and walruses that they love are just outside their back door.

So when Canadian scientists wanted to test for PCB levels in the Inuit diet, it was to Broughton Island that they turned.

For nearly three years, a group of researchers had the villagers keep careful track of everything they ate. In addition, the investigators took samples of the villagers’ blood and breast milk and sent these to Muir’s laboratory for analysis.

In 1989, the results were in, and the news wasn’t good. While Broughton Island’s mean intake of PCBs was still within Canada’s so-called “tolerable daily intake,” 10% to 20% of the villagers, depending on their sex and the time of year, were consuming more PCBs than the safe limit. More than half the children sampled were over the limit, and some breast milk samples were found to be contaminated as well.

When the researchers released their findings, a ripple of fear spread through Broughton Island. Government health authorities told the villagers to go on eating “country food,” noting that the benefits were well documented while the risks were not, but the villagers were not convinced. Some people quit eating seal meat and began loading up on the costly processed foods at the general store.

One anxious young mother stopped nursing her baby and, in hopes of protecting the child, fed it bottles of Coffeemate mixed with water. The baby wound up in the hospital.

Inuit in other villages, unaware that the Broughton Island study had troubling implications for them as well, took to shunning the Broughton Islanders as “the PCB people.” In the south, a man who had been buying a supply of Arctic fish from the village and marketing it as an exotic delicacy suddenly backed out of the deal. That cut off one of Broughton Island’s few sources of income.

Rumors began to fly in the village that the PCB study had been no more than a cruel hoax spun out by the Canadian government, in collusion with the animal-rights movement, to scare the Inuit out of killing any more wildlife. Still other villagers insisted that the PCBs were really coming from an old DEW Line station near their town and that the Canadian government was blaming the anonymous winds and the waters as a way of covering up for its powerful ally, the United States.

“We don’t know what to believe or what not to believe,” says community health worker Sarah Kooneeliusie, who adds that lately she has seen some local people’s hair mysteriously fall out and grow back again and that people’s bones seem to break a lot more easily than they used to. She wonders whether these phenomena are related to chemical contamination.

“I keep thinking, What more can we do? Who can we turn to?” she says, looking around her simple office in the village clinic. “We ourselves cannot do further studies.”

Study in Quebec

Far to the south, in Sainte-Foye, Quebec, Eric Dewailly is now carrying out the study that may finally clarify the risks to northerners of PCBs in their diet. Dewailly, environmental health director of the provincial community health service, became interested in the subject in 1987--before the alarming Broughton Island data came to light--when he was conducting a general survey of pollutants in mothers’ milk in Quebec.

There is a small Inuit population in northern Quebec, and Dewailly went into his work with the idea that the Inuit milk would be purer than the milk of mothers in the heavily industrialized south.

But to his dismay, Dewailly found the opposite to be true. The milk of the remote Inuit mothers was laced with PCB concentrations five times greater than those of the southern women.

This finding, and the subsequent Broughton Island results, prompted Dewailly to monitor northern and southern Quebec babies to see whether those getting high doses of PCBs from breast milk had any skin diseases, lowered immunity levels or other health problems. He recently finished collecting his raw data; the results are due in the fall.

If the babies getting PCBs through their mothers’ milk do prove sickly, then the Canadian government will have ample ammunition to confront the various manufacturers of toxic organochlorines around the world and the Third World countries that buy from them.

For now, without hard evidence of a health problem, the problems of the Canadian Arctic have seemed abstract indeed when compared to those of the tropical countries plagued by malaria outbreaks and crop infestations.

“People in Africa say, ‘Who the hell are you anyhow, to tell us our people have got to die (of starvation or malaria) after you used (agricultural toxins) indiscriminately for years?’ ” said David Thomas, head of Seakem Group, a British Columbia consulting firm that has done extensive work on Arctic contaminants.

Finnish Initiative

Already, Canada has taken its concerns to the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe, which represents most of the industrialized countries that produce the offending chemicals and sell them abroad. The commission has been working on a protocol that it would like to see govern the manufacture and sale of hazardous chemicals.

There is also the so-called Finnish Initiative, an attempt initiated by Finland in 1989 to get the eight circumpolar countries to hammer out a mutually agreeable set of research standards, to begin to cooperate on studies of certain species and to transfer pollution-control technology from richer nations to poorer ones. An accord was signed in Finland this month.

The Finnish Initiative is only a starting point, but those involved with it say the circumpolar nations have made remarkable progress, considering some of them weren’t even speaking to each other a few years ago, in the thick of the Cold War.

Even so, the pace of chemical contamination is even more remarkable.

“In the last half-hour, while you and I have been talking about this, maybe eight or 10 new organic chemicals have been synthesized,” says Thomas, the British Columbia consultant. “And a lot of them are really bad news. If the Arctic, which has no industry, is starting to have contaminants in it, then that tells you something about the rest of the world. There is no safe spot.”

Arctic Pollution

In remote arctic regions, experts and natives alike have begun to detect serious problems caused by environmental pollution swept northward by winds, currents and animal life. Surprising concentrations of pesticides, herbicides and industrial compounds used in the south are appearing in the arctic. In fact, on distant Broughton Island, the Eskimos, or Innuit (“the people”), have been found to have some of the highest PCB concentrations among humans on Earth. INDUSTRIAL: MILLS, MINING: Compounds, some of them now banned in Canada and the United States, but still used in the south, have been found.

NUCLEAR CONTAMINATION: Contaminants from test sites and from the Chernobyl reactor accident, as well as other mishaps, is a concern.

MARINE LIFE: Some species of fish, as they devour others, serve to concentrate toxic pollutants and pass them in increasing amounts up the food chain.

PESTICIDE SPRAYING: Like industrial pollutants, many pesticides have been banned in Canada and United States but still are detected in arctic regions.

SHIP-BORNE POLLUTION: Seaborne dumping and accidental releases of harmful materials are showing up far away in once-pristine arctic zones.

OIL AND GAS : Pipelines are potential sources of leaks, and tankers are subject to spill danger. Human habitation of drilling sites leads to further pollution.

MILITARY ACTIVITY: Low-level flying causes contamination by propellants. Military sites, both active and abandoned, are sources of PCBs and other toxic substances.

Source: Canadian Arctic Resources Center