Forty years after grassy narrows First Nation’s mercury-drenched river system was proclaimed off limits, a recently released report on the health fallout in the community north of Kenora has arrived at a more ominous conclusion.
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It’s possible that even small amounts of mercury below Health Canada’s guidelines are continuing to poison people and causing health problems.
Are federal and provincial guidelines on the safe eating of fish out of date?
At an emotional meeting at the Lakeside Inn in Kenora in March, Japanese Minamata disease expert Dr. Masazumi Harada revealed the report’s findings to the community.
He explained that even locals who showed mild signs of contamination in 1975 showed actual symptoms of Minamata (tremors, speech impairment, impaired concentration, etc) almost three decades later.
This is despite the fact that mercury levels in the local water supply and fish, and in First Nations residents themselves, had dramatically decreased.
What this suggests, he said, is that low levels of mercury in fish may be more dangerous than previously thought.
The federal government is taking the findings seriously. Health Canada spokesperson Christelle Legault says the ministry’s now studying Harada’s report.
That report seems to solve the frightening mystery in the Grassy Narrows community: mercury levels are down, but residents are getting sicker.
“It hurts when doctors say we’re pretending,” Chief Simon Fobister told the meeting, where mothers struggled to hold back tears as they described their children’s deteriorating health.
But Grassy Narrows’ dilemma could be the future of many other communities, given the pervasiveness of mercury.
Blame coal-burning plants, smelting, incineration, even clear-cutting, as well as mining. Industrial releases add to natural mercury sources, from geological deposits to forest fires.
On the James Bay coast, another First Nations agency, the Mushkegowuk Environmental Research Centre, is issuing its own red alert. The agency has been sampling fish in the Albany and Attawapiskat Rivers and finding high levels of methyl mercury.
De Beers’s Victor diamond mine on the Attawapiskat, which started production in July 2008, has been a cause for concern, says Grand Chief Stan Louttit of the Mushkegowuk Council, which represents eight First Nations.
Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment changed its fish consumption advisory for a stretch of the river near the mine – an important First Nations fishery – to four meals a month, from the previous eight.
But MOE spokesperson Kate Jordan says water samples collected near the mine do not show any statistically significant increases in methyl mercury. David Lean, a professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Ottawa, isn’t surprised that limits of fish consumption have changed. He predicted mercury increases.
In a 2007 submission to the MOE, Lean warned that changes to proposed limits from the De Beers mine would bring mercury in the Attawapiskat River to unacceptable levels.
“A little mercury can go a long way,” Lean says.
De Beers did not respond to a request from NOW for comment, but company spokesperson Tom Ormsby called natives’ eco and health concerns over the mine unfounded in a 2009 article in Northern Ontario Business.
Mines are notorious for leaching mercury as they pump water out of the ground.
Jennifer Simard, executive director of the Mushkegowuk Centre, notes that not enough fish have been tested from the De Beers stretch to reach a statistically significant conclusion.
But she says she was surprised by results from the nearby Albany River, which also led to a new advisory restricting consumption.
The cause here could be any one of a “suite” of possibilities, like atmospheric deposition or breakup of Arctic ice, Simard says. “We need more research.”
Until that’s done, she says, huge hydroelectric projects that Ontario is planning for rivers draining into James Bay should be put on hold.
Lean, a member of a provincial science advisory panel that is finalizing recommendations to regulate resource exploration in the north, is concerned that De Beers’s production method – pumping water from a huge wetland area to facilitate open-pit mining – sets a dangerous precedent.
Lean warns against any drainage of the vast peatlands of the north because of the potential to release mercury as well as carbon.
In Kenora, Harada has the same message. “We still don’t have all the answers.” That’s why he has returned five times to northwestern Ontario to document the progress of mercury poisoning. “Environmental pollution takes a long time to investigate.”
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