Pollution fears threaten a way of life
Alaska: Reports of tainted animals have the native Chevak tribe 
reconsidering their traditional and healthy subsistence diet.

Tom Horton
Sun Staff
September 20, 2004
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-te.ms.alaska20sep20,1,5575324.story 
<http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-te.ms.alaska20sep20,1,5575324.story?coll=bal-health-headlines>

CHEVAK, Alaska - Even maps of Alaska often don't identify Kokechik Bay, 
a small inlet of the Bering Sea in the vast delta between the Yukon and 
Kuskokwim Rivers. No one lives there except for half a dozen contractors 
manning a Cold War-era radar site, still trained on the former Soviet Union.

But the bay has always been life itself to a few thousand members of 
Alaska's native tribes in three nearby subsistence villages.

"Our elders always used to tell us, in times of hardship, Kokechik Bay 
is the place you go, the place you can rely on even in bad times," 
recalls Richard Tuluq, tribal administrator of Chevak.

In recent years, however, Tuluq says, people here and members of other 
Bering coast tribes in neighboring Hooper Bay and Scammon Bay have 
virtually ceased harvesting Arctic cod, blackfish, clams and other 
traditional foods from Kokechik.

While they still fish elsewhere, Alaskan natives are increasingly 
troubled by evidence of contamination in this corner of the 
million-square mile Bering Sea - source of about half of all seafood 
caught in the United States.

Amid reports of toxic leaks from the radar station at nearby Cape 
Romanzof, and of pollutants from distant lands carried here by winds and 
ocean currents, the natives worry that there is a link to rising adult 
cancer rates among their people and sharp increases in early childhood 
illnesses such as pneumonia and chronic infections. They complain of 
increased encounters with tumors and other mysterious abnormalities in 
fish, shellfish and bird eggs in the Kokechik Bay region.

"The food from there is not the same as when I was younger," said James 
Gump, 78, a Hooper Bay native who volunteers at the village school to 
teach children about traditional hunting and fishing techniques.

To subsistence peoples, this is worrisome in a way that the outside 
world of supermarket shoppers can scarcely imagine.

 From whales, walruses and sea lions to berries and buttercups, the 
natives of this harsh coastal plain depend on what they get from the 
natural environment for survival.

"If you gave me enough money to buy everything at the store, I would 
probably spend it on more hunting gear," tribal hunter and fisherman 
Albert Simon says over a lunch of dried salmon soaked in seal oil and 
frozen herring roe. "Our cultural identity is based on subsistence ... 
and you know, it's fun."

Scientists and health experts don't agree on whether the contamination 
showing up in fish and wildlife here poses a threat to natives' health. 
But they do worry that fear is helping drive people from historically 
healthy subsistence diets to eating more modern processed foods.

That shift in consumption could be causing some of the ailments people 
are attributing to pollution, experts say - not to mention speeding the 
unraveling of traditional culture.

Increasingly vocal native groups are insisting on an accounting. "We 
want to find out what's in our environment, because that's our food ... 
that's what's in us," says Agatha Napoleon, a Hooper Bay resident who 
has led efforts to track contaminants from the Cape Romanzof radar station.

The same issues face native peoples from Alaska across Canada to 
Greenland, where studies have documented elevated levels of mercury, 
PCBs, pesticides and other toxic substances in the blood, hair and 
breast milk of people who eat a lot of wild fish and game.

Scientists and local leaders debate what is known as "the Arctic 
dilemma": how to answer natives' demands to know about the toxicants in 
their diet, without scaring them away from healthy traditional foods.

Evidence of health problems is compelling, even if the reasons are 
debatable.

"There has been a rise in cancers and other health problems - native 
kids in the Yukon-Kuskokwim area in their first year have 10 times the 
national rate of hospitalization for respiratory infections - so people 
are seeing things they've never seen before," says Dr. James Berner, a 
pediatrician in Alaska since 1974 and director of health for the Alaska 
Native Tribes Health Consortium in Anchorage.

The occurrence of cancer among Alaskan natives continues to rise, while 
rates are falling among U.S. whites. During the 1990s, studies showed 
natives here died of cancers at a 30 percent higher rate than whites. 
Lung and digestive system cancers were prominent.

Berner has found above-normal levels of toxic substances such cadmium, 
mercury and PCBs in blood from infants and their mothers in a number of 
Yukon delta tribal villages. He says studies from the eastern Canadian 
Arctic show that at high enough levels such chemicals do seem to cause 
significantly greater problems with infections.

A study of Inuit babies in northern Quebec, reported last year, detected 
subtle nervous-system and behavioral changes that researchers say appear 
to be linked with mercury and PCB contamination.

"But to date in our data here," Berner says, "the effects are pretty mild."

There is a host of reasons other than toxic substances in the 
environment, Berner says, that are more likely causes of health 
problems: alcohol abuse, smoking, living longer and seeing more cancer 
develop, better diagnoses, poor sanitation (Hooper Bay has no running 
water).

The evidence, says Carl Hild, a polar health expert at the University of 
Alaska at Anchorage, "is that while we know there's more environmental 
contamination than there used to be, the risk to health from the 
subsistence diet is still mostly theoretical, while its benefits are 
well documented."

The fish-rich traditional diet of Alaskan natives is enormously high in 
the omega fatty acids that prevent stroke and heart attack; also low in 
sugar that can lead to diabetes. Fats and oils are also where many 
toxics tend to concentrate - in wildlife and humans.

Health officials also stress that the year-round procuring and 
preparation of subsistence food is seen as central to maintaining native 
cultures, whose unraveling is already linked to extraordinarily high 
rates of suicide, fetal alcohol syndrome and other problems.

Compounding the "Arctic dilemma," Hild says, "native peoples believe 
they are one with the environment, and when the environment is 
contaminated, they are, too."

So far, at least, Alaskan natives have not abandoned subsistence hunting 
and fishing, though their diets are heavily laden with store-bought 
foods. A survey for the Alaskan Native Health Board of 665 people, from 
teenagers to 80-something elders, revealed that sugared juices and soda 
were the most heavily consumed foods in all Alaskan native communities. 
Yet fish, moose and caribou continued to rank in the top 50, and even 
berries occupied a prominent place.

As a gale rattles cold rain against the windows in Hooper Bay, at 1,300 
people the largest of Alaska's native villages, Agatha Napoleon and 
Albert Simon take visitors through the cycle of a native year.

Springtime brings the big, bearded seals, beluga whales, walrus and 
masses of migrating eider ducks. "The air is fresh and warm, and every 
day is beautiful," Simon says.

The herring run in May offers not only fish, but kelp, harvested from 
under water and eaten with the herring roe that encrusts it. In June, 
the tribes trek several miles to "birdland," where they gather the eggs 
of nesting waterfowl. In recent years, they have found many "weird, 
soft, leathery eggshells," Napoleon says. "No one picks them up."

Summer features an exodus inland to "berry camp," where the villagers 
pick salmon berries and fish for pike in the freshwater rivers. But most 
vital to this season are the salmon runs - "one week then is a lifetime 
if you depend on fish, as we do," Simon says.

Unusual finds

Two summers ago, salmon began turning up dead, riddled with holes and 
"burnt-looking" skin and fins, nothing even the oldest fishermen had 
ever seen before.

Napoleon's family ended up with 10 gallons of salmon put away for the 
long winter - 60 to 80 gallons would be normal, she says. She has 
documented the drastically reduced harvests, family by family, to help 
Hooper Bay apply for state food aid.

Suspicion about the cause of the drop-off in catch, for the fish kills 
and weird eggs, has wavered between the radar station and 
"trans-boundary pollution," another name for the long-traveling fallout 
of toxic chemicals from the more developed nations to the south and west.

Napoleon says no one paid much attention to the Cape Romanzof station 
until 1998, when they heard of Air Force cleanup plans. She came across 
tests done in the late 1980s by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 
around the cape, which lies within the sprawling Yukon Delta National 
Wildlife Refuge, slightly larger than South Carolina. These found PCBs 
and 38 other "contaminants of concern" in fish, waters and mammals there.

The report ventured no conclusions on threats to humans, but said the 
contaminants "may be indicative of a more extensive problem." It 
recommended a follow-up, but nothing happened.

In 1999, tribes of the three villages, feeling stonewalled by the Air 
Force, traveled to Washington to see Alaska's Congressional delegation. 
That yielded a $650,000 monitoring program in which the natives 
themselves, directed and trained by scientists, sample fish and 
wildlife, plants, water and sediments around Kokechik Bay and the villages.

"We look at this as one of our success stories, responding to community 
concerns," says Michael Rhoads, who manages environmental cleanup at 
Cape Romanzof and dozens of other Air Force facilities that have spilled 
or improperly disposed of chemicals into the Alaskan environment during 
the last several decades.

Rhoads says Cape Romanzof, built in the early 1950s, has no record of 
what might have leaked or been dumped during its early decades, but he 
is "pretty satisfied" nothing is escaping the site now.

Toxics used there, he says, were mostly diesel fuel and PCBs. "If it 
turns out that contamination has migrated offsite [to Kokechik Bay], 
that is our responsibility also ... but I think there's far, far greater 
potential for global contamination to be a bigger concern," Rhoads says.

Alaska to date is considered less affected than the eastern Arctic by 
the array of PCBs, pesticides, mercury and other pollutants carried 
northward and eastward in air and ocean currents. Eastern regions like 
Greenland are most tainted, experts believe, because they are closer to 
the pollutants' sources.

But the Alaskan Arctic is little studied compared with other polar 
regions, notes Michael Smolen, a toxicologist with the Washington-based 
World Wildlife Fund, who is acting as the tribes' consultant in testing 
the soil and water around the radar station.

"They are picking up things about their environment - salmon rotting 
away, soft eggshells, clamshells that crumble at the touch - things no 
scientist knew," Smolen says.

'Huge step forward'

While the buildup of older, mostly banned pollutants such as DDT and 
PCBs may have peaked, studies have detected two newer, unregulated 
classes of toxic industrial chemicals working their way into Arctic food 
webs.

Perfluorinated chemicals - widely used in clothing and furniture as a 
fabric protector, as well as in nonstick cookware - have been found to 
be toxic to laboratory animals at levels near those found in wild 
animals and in people. Unlike other toxic chemicals, which accumulate in 
fatty tissue, the perfluorinated compounds concentrate in the liver and 
often escape detection in standard blood tests.

Another looming threat is a group of bromine compounds widely used in 
fire retardants and fabric protection treatments, which have been 
showing up in the breast milk of North American mothers at levels far 
above those detected in Europe. Tests, again with laboratory animals, 
have found liver and developmental problems and thyroid hormone changes. 
Some of the biological effects seen in mice mirror those associated with 
PCBs.

World Wildlife's Smolen has received funding for the three villages to 
study their local diet in an attempt to understand what chemicals are 
actually reaching them through their intimate contact with the 
environment. While the current sampling around the radar station was a 
"huge step forward," he says people will likely remain concerned until 
they understand what's actually getting into their bodies.

"We will find pluses and minuses to the native diet, no doubt," he says. 
"But they will be in control of the information, and probably be better 
equipped to make dietary choices than people in the lower 48."

Copyright © 2004

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