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.
