By Janet Raloff
Carved from the Northwest Territories, Nunavut became Canada’s newest territory* last year. This huge arctic territory is home to a mere 24,000 people, mostly native Inuit. Though Nunavut lacks heavy industries, it hasn’t avoided their toxic fallout. The breast milk of Inuit women there, for instance, contains twice the average concentration of dioxin found in the milk of women in southern Quebec. One reason is that the Inuit diet consists primarily of fatty animals high in the food chain, which accumulate especially high concentrations of dioxin.
A new study finds that most of Nunavut’s dioxin comes from industrial combustion in the eastern and midwestern United States—not Canada. Some even originates as far away as Mexico. The Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), created under the North American Free Trade Agreement, released the findings this week.