Far North’s Cancer Rates Blamed on Tobacco

ANCHORAGE — Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the Far North among Native Americans and Eskimos, or Inuit, and experts say the cause is simple--smoking.

Secondhand smoke presents major problems for children cooped up for long winters with smoking parents, and low birth weights are recorded for children born to smoking mothers.

An international conference of scientific experts held in May in Alaska said smoking had replaced tuberculosis as the greatest single health threat to Inuit and American Indians.

A nine-year study by the Danish Cancer Registry found that lung cancer rates among Inuit populations around the Far North were some of the highest in the world. And a University of Alberta study found that infants of smoking mothers in the Inuvik zone of Canada’s Northwest Territories weighed less on average than those born to nonsmoking mothers.