High Contamination Reported in Arctic Russians

Russians in remote reaches of the Arctic carry growing levels of industrial chemicals and pesticides, making them among the most contaminated people on Earth, according to a report released Wednesday by the Russian Federation and an international group of scientists.

Since the collapse of the Soviet economy, Russia’s indigenous northerners have had less access to imported foods and are relying more on a traditional diet of seal, whale and other wild animals. These natural food sources have accumulated toxic chemicals as pollutants have drifted northward from urban areas with winds and ocean currents.

As a result, chemical concentrations in Arctic inhabitants, particularly in residents of Chukotka, across the Bering Strait from Alaska, are extraordinarily high.

Scientists have already shown that other Arctic natives, particularly the Inuit of Greenland and Canada, have the highest levels of many toxic substances found in humans anywhere.

But this project is the first to monitor people in the vast, isolated regions of Russia’s far north. The research was conducted by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a scientific group funded by Arctic nations, including the United States, which worked with the Russian government and the Russian Assn. of Indigenous Peoples of the North.

The report calls the contaminants “one of the most serious environmental and human health risks” for the Russian Arctic. The levels of two pesticides, hexachlorobenzene and hexachlorocyclohexane, and, in some areas, PCBs and the pesticide DDT, in Russians are “among the highest reported for all of the Arctic regions,” the report says.

“We are poisoned and so are our children,” said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which represents Arctic people in Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Chukotka. This research “really arms us, strengthens us, to be able to move forward and push toward global action on these very important issues for the indigenous people of the Arctic.”

About 2 million people inhabit the Russian Arctic; about 200,000 are native to the region. The report says the 16,000 people of Chukotka, in northeastern Russia, “are the main concern with respect to human health risks.” They eat marine mammals, whose blubber stores toxic compounds.

“In the areas of the Russian Arctic studied, practically every indigenous family consumes a significant amount of traditional food,” the report says. “Families with low incomes rely to a greater extent on the local, fat-rich traditional diet. As a consequence, low-income, indigenous families are at greater risk of exposure.”

The health threat is mostly to infants and children, since the chemicals are passed on to fetuses and taint breast milk. In studies of Canadian Inuit, PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, have been linked to immune suppression and slight neurological damage in infants. Many of the contaminants have been tied to hormonal changes in Arctic wildlife and to cancer in laboratory animals.

Some of the contaminants probably came from within Russia, particularly the PCBs. The report recommends that Russia create an inventory of sources within its borders.

However, other chemicals, such as the pesticide mirex, were never used in Russia, so they probably flowed there from cities in North America or Europe, propelled by northbound winds and currents.

“We knew that levels probably would be higher in Russia because of all the contamination going on in that country,” Watt-Cloutier said.

The report recommends that Russians develop a strategy to lower exposure without endangering traditional cultures and reducing already inadequate food supplies. For example, the Inuit of Canada are advised to eat more fish, which is less contaminated than beluga or seal.

The findings will be presented next week to ministers of the eight-nation Arctic Council.

Lars-Otto Reiersen, of the Arctic monitoring program’s secretariat, based in Norway, said industrialized nations where the chemicals originate had “a moral duty” to find solutions. “We cannot send the dirt to our neighbors and close our eyes,” he said. “Reductions in use and emissions will have to be done at the source.”

Many of the chemicals, including PCBs, DDT and mirex, have already been banned in the U.S. and most other industrialized nations. But they are still leaking from old equipment, stockpiles and contaminated fields and waters, and once they reach the Arctic, they remain there for decades.

The Stockholm Convention, an international treaty that went into effect in May, restricts 12 of the chemicals, dubbed the “Dirty Dozen,” and implements cleanup projects. U.S. officials have not ratified the treaty because they disagree with the procedure for banning compounds.