Modern World's Poisons Find Their Way To The Arctic

BROUGHTON ISLAND, Northwest Territories - There are no factory whistles splitting the air here in Broughton Island, 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The largest "industry" in town is a sewing circle, housed in a one-room building where women fashion parkas out of the glossy gray pelts of caribou.

Here, about 450 Eskimos - they call themselves Inuit - live by hunting and fishing. Their language, Inuktitut, has no word for "contamination."

Broughton Island is the last place on Earth one would associate with chemical hazards. Yet 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.

"They said it was dangerous, but how dangerous?" says Broughton Island Mayor Lootie Toomasie. Two years after researchers brought their bad news to his village and then departed, Toomasie says no one has been able to tell him conclusively about the long-term effects of PCBs on his people's health.

All across the 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. Pinpointing sources of contamination is only now beginning.

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 multilateral protocols on arctic pollution recently.

Officials note that their worries do not stem from any new, sky-high levels of toxins found in the soils or water of the north. What has lately attracted the attention of the scientific community is the way relatively low levels of contaminants are magnifying themselves billions of times in the arctic food chain, and the glaringly unjust result: The simple hunting societies of the arctic appear to be packing toxins into their bodies at a faster rate than the people of the world's pampered, polluting, temperate zones.

"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.

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.

Bangay's teams found rusting 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.

Polychlorinated biphenyls are a family of more than 200 related organic compounds. Some are harmless. 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. PCBs in their flesh triggered widespread concern, for it seemed to suggest that the DEW Line stations were leaking their PCBs into arctic waters. Scientists began checking to see whether there might be chemical hot spots where the DEW stations once stood.

But as the research progressed, investigators began to realize that the DEW Line sites were the least of their worries. The contamination could not be leaching from the abandoned outposts alone; there were too many pollutants, and the chemicals were far too widely dispersed across the arctic.

At the Canadian government's Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg, Manitoba, research scientist Derek Muir and Ross Norstrum of the Canadian National Wildlife Research Center, began to study arctic food chains. "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 instead accumulate in the fatty tissues of animals.

And the scientists 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 restricted in North America.

Most arctic marine mammals are thickly padded with fat for insulation and thus accumulate organochlorines 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 animals at the bottom of the food chain, from there into the flesh fish, then into seals, and finally on up to the polar bears, their concentration has increased about 3 billion times.

Working with Inuit hunters across the Canadian arctic, Muir 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 an 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.

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. If they don't enter the food chain where they alight, they simply evaporate the next time their resting place heats up. Then off they go again.

For nearly three years, a group of Canadian government researchers had the Broughton Islanders keep track of everything they ate. 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. While Broughton Island's mean intake of PCBs was still within Canada's "tolerable daily intake," 10 percent to 20 percent of the villagers 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.

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. Some people quit eating seal meat, and began loading up on the costly processed foods at the general store. One mother stopped nursing her baby and, in hopes of protecting the child, fed it bottles of nondairy coffee creamer 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, shunned the Broughton Islanders as "the PCB people." In the south, a man who had been buying a supply of arctic fish from the village suddenly backed out of the deal.

In Sainte-Foye, Quebec, Eric Dewailly is now carrying out the study that may clarify the risks of PCBs in northerners' diets. Dewailly, environmental health director of the provincial community health service, became interested in the subject in 1987 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 that 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 or lowered immunity levels. His 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, the problems of the Canadian arctic have seemed abstract indeed when compared with those of 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?' " says David Thomas, head of Seakem Group, a British Columbia consulting firm that has done extensive work on arctic contaminants.

Already, Canada has taken its concerns to the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe. 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 in 1989 to get the eight circumpolar countries to hammer out a set of research standards, to begin cooperative studies, 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 were not even speaking to each other a few years ago.

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 B.C. 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."