Last October Robert Joamie fell ill with an active case of tuberculosis.
I had collapsed lungs and I was hardly breathing and it was hard, hard to breathe.
He had to isolate for two months at his home in Pangnirtung,
a community of about 1,500 people on Baffin Island in Nunavut.
Eventually Mr. Joamie, a sanitation worker for the hamlet, grew so sick
that he had to be flown on a Medivac plane to a hospital in Iqaluit, Nunavut's capital.
Mr. Joamie caught tuberculosis as part of a major outbreak in Pangnirtung.
In May the Government of Nunavut revealed that 31 active cases and 108 cases of
latent or "sleeping" tuberculosis had been identified in the hamlet in the past 18 months.
The largest tuberculosis outbreak in Nunavut since 2017.
A Globe and Mail investigation based on more than 200 pages of internal documents obtained
through an access to information request found the understaffed health centre in
Pangnirtung didn't have the resources it needed to control the outbreak as it took off last year.
The lone public health nurse working in Pangnirtung in the summer of 2021
begged the Government of Nunavut for help as the number of tuberculosis cases grew.
In a September 9, 2021 email the nurse wrote:
The TB program needed manpower a month ago. The program is failing every single day.
TB continues to spread. It needs help immediately. I have been utterly clear in my repeated requests.
I am at a loss where to go to have my words heard.
Meanwhile long time Pangnirtung residents like Looee Mike, an Anglican minister and
host at the local Inuktitut radio station couldn't get any official information about
the number of TB cases in her community until the territorial government's announcement in late May.
No one from department of health, Government of Nunavut. No one from health, local or no one from
community reps, health workers. No official word. We just hear because someone mentioned
a number and I know a number
Mayor Eric Lawlor is one of the Pangnirtung residents who thinks
the government was slow to declare the outbreak and slow to tackle it.
He points to the hamlet's community hall as proof.
The Government of Nunavut began renting the space in March for a satellite tuberculosis clinic
but it took the territorial government until June to get the clinic up and running.
A spokeswoman for the Nunavut Department of Health said the delay was caused by a shortage
of technicians to install internet lines and other essential equipment.
She also said the government sent extra public health workers to the community last fall and
winter and made the right call in waiting until the end of November to declare a TB outbreak.
The mayor disagrees.
I think they could've acted a lot quicker on it.
I know their focus was on Covid but this was just as bad or even not worse of a situation because
this TB sticks with you.
Covid eventually disappears, it eventually goes away.
But this here's been sticking with us. Unless you get your medication then
you're stuck with it and it can eventually become a serious, serious issue.
And with all our housings being overpopulated no one's able to go and isolate properly, so they're
stuck isolating at their house with the family and then possibly spreading it on to them.
It wasn't supposed to be this way.
In 2018 the Federal government promised to eliminate tuberculosis in Inuit communities by 2030.
This should absolutely not happen. It's an entirely preventable and treatable condition
but the stories of young people dying of tuberculosis in Canada in the 21st
century are part of what drives us to this commitment we're making today.
In some recent years, the TB rate among Inuit has been as much as
300 times higher than the rate among non-Indigenous people born in Canada.
Making good on the elimination promise has been a challenge.
The coronavirus pandemic sucked up the time money and attention of public health workers.
And in isolated northern communities like Pangnirtung, poverty, chronic illness,
a lack of health care staff and a severe housing shortage all make it difficult to control TB.
There's no space available. Because each room may house three or four people.
Little bedrooms.
Because maybe there's a young couple with their own kids in one bedroom.
I know that because I'm like that. I have a young family living with me in a bedroom
because there's no house available.
Mr. Joamie spent about a week in the hospital. After months of daily medication
he's now recovered and back at work.
And the Government of Nunavut said in May that Pangnirtung's TB numbers were improving
and the curve was flattening. A hopeful sign.
But Ms. Mike wants to see the Government of Nunavut do more to fight tuberculosis.
There's absolutely nothing being done. Right away doctors should be swarming here and nurses should
be doing this and that. Nothing, absolutely nothing being done. That's where we are.