A new study concludes that chimpanzees displaying a range of ailments seek out plants with known medicinal properties to treat those ailments.
The finding is important because it’s a rare instance where a species is shown to consume a plant as medicine rather than as part of its general diet.
The study identified 13 plant species that the chimpanzees in Uganda’s Budongo Forest relied on, which can help inform conservation efforts for the great apes.
The finding could also hold potential for the development of new drugs for human use.
Wild chimpanzees actively seek out plants with medicinal properties to treat themselves for specific ailments,a new study has found.
While most animals consume foods with medicinal properties as part of their routine diet, few species have been shown to engage in self-medication in a way that suggests they have basic awareness of the healing properties of the plants they’re feeding on.
Until now, the challenge has been to distinguish between normal consumption of food that has medicinal value, on the one hand, and ingesting such foods for the purpose of treating a condition, on the other.
“Self-medication has been studied for years, but it has been historically difficult to push the field forward, as the burden of proof is very high when attempting to prove that a resource is used as a medicine,” Elodie Freymann, a scientist at the University of Oxford in the U.K. and lead author of the study, told Mongabay in an email.
To deal with the challenge, the study adopted a multidisciplinary approach, combining behavioral data, health monitoring, and pharmacological testing of a variety of plant materials chimpanzees feed on. It pooled together 13 researchers comprising primatologists, ethnopharmacologists, parasitologists, ecologists and botanists.
A chimpanzee in Uganda’s Budongo Forest, which is home to roughly 600-700 chimpanzees, including three groups habituated to humans. Image by Maciej via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
According to the study, pharmacological data interpreted on its own is important for establishing the presence of medicinal resources in chimpanzee diets. However, this study also relied on observational information and health monitoring to determine whether chimps were deliberately self-medicating.
Over a period of eight months, the scientists monitored the feeding behaviors of two communities of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) familiar with humans around them in Budongo Forest in Uganda.
They collected samples from plant parts associated with chimpanzee behaviors that previous research had flagged up as possibly linked to self-medication: consuming bark, dead wood and bitter pith.
The researchers collected samples from 13 plant species known to be consumed at least occasionally by the Budongo chimpanzees, testing the samples for their ability to suppress bacterial growth and inflammation (testing for antiparasitical properties was beyond the scope of the study).
The researchers also tracked the health of individual chimpanzees, analyzing fecal matter and urine and monitoring individuals with wounds, parasite infestations or other known ailments.
They observed that individuals with injuries or other ailments such as parasite infestations, respiratory symptoms, abnormal urinalysis or diarrhea ingested plants or parts of plants that laboratory testing found to have healing properties.
A Budongo chimpanzee feeding on the fruit of Ficus exasperata, one of the plants analyzed as part of the study. Image courtesy of Elodie Freymann (CC-BY 4.0).
“We describe cases where chimpanzees with possible bacterial infections or wounds selected bioactive plants,” Freymann said. “We also describe cases where wounded individuals selected rarely consumed plants with demonstrated anti-inflammatory properties — suggesting they could be ingesting plants to aid in wound-healing, a novel finding.”
In addition, unlike previous studies that focused on single plant resources, this one identified 13 species with medicinal potential.
“This greatly expands what we know about chimpanzee medicinal repertoires. This study also highlights the unique medicinal repertoires of two chimpanzee communities with no previous systematic research on their self-medication behaviors,” Freymann said.
According to Freymann, identifying plants that could have medicinal value for chimpanzees is important for the conservation of the species.
“If we know which plants chimpanzees need to stay healthy in the wild, we can better protect these resources to ensure chimpanzees have access to their wild medicine cabinets,” she said. “If these plants disappear, it could leave our primate cousins susceptible to pathogens they could previously defend against.”
This is also important, Freymann said, because “we could learn from the chimpanzees which plants may have medicinal value which could lead to the discovery of novel human drugs.”
The study adds to a growing body of research on primates using medicinal plants to treat sickness. In another recent report, a wild orangutan in Sumatra was observed treating a facial wound with a plant known for its healing properties. Erin Wessling, co-lead of the working group on chimpanzee cultures at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, said part of the reason for the recent attention to these types of medicative behaviors is because they’re relatively rare and can only be identified in species that have been closely monitored over long periods of time.
“It takes years to be able to watch apes in the wild to this level of detail, and even more years after that to be able to identify with any certainty what are core components of an ape’s diet versus the much more rare medicinal use cases,” she said.
Wessling, who was not part of the study, told Mongabay that while it’s been known that chimpanzees have these rare cases of medicinal use, scientists are finally getting to a level where they can point to self-medication as a widespread and diverse behavior used across medicinal contexts.
She said the Budongo study “points out really nicely that conservation is more than just a numbers game — that there’s real value in thinking about how organisms interact with the ecosystems they reside in, and that even the most uncommon components of those ecosystems can be critical for an organisms’ survival.
“Further, results such as these offer a nice insight into the intrinsic value of chimpanzees, demonstrating what we’ve suspected for a long time — that chimpanzees have the capability to recognize and treat an ailment with plants that have natural (and measurable) medicinal properties,” Wessling said.
“It shows we have a great deal left to learn about the natural world, not only our ape cousins, and provides even more reason to make sure there is a future for them.”
Editor’s note: Mining poisons the earth, not only right now, but for future generations: even if the mine is closed and all workers have left, the chemicals and metals that they have used and mined will stay hidden in the soil. But it can’t be hidden forever. When the earth moves due to flooding so do the chemicals. They then poison the land and water and damage the ecosystems.
Uganda’s Nyamwamba river, in the Rwenzori Mountains, has begun to flood catastrophically in recent years, partly due to climate change. Along the river are copper tailings pools from an old Canadian mining operation, which are becoming increasingly eroded by the flooding. According to a series of studies, these tailings have been washing into the water supply and soil of the Nyamwamba River Basin, contaminating human tissue, food and water with deadly heavy metals. Cancer rates are higher than normal near the tailings pools, and scientists fear that as the flooding continues to worsen, so will the health crisis.
KASESE, Uganda — Right as the Nyamwamba River emerges from the foothills of western Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains and begins its final descent onto the savanna, it passes by a curious sight. On the far bank from the road, past piles of sun-bleached stones on the now-dry riverbed, the earth has been disturbed. Towering walls stand naked and exposed amid the surrounding hills, as if a mighty hand has taken a scoop from the very landscape itself. Sheer cliffs emerge abruptly from the green scrub above, crashing downward into a flat, brownish pit of sand and rocks.
This is a copper tailings pool. Along with its siblings, it’s poisoning this part of Uganda.
The pools were built to hold waste from a mine once operated by Falconbridge, a Canadian company that ruled over the Rwenzori foothills from the 1950s to late ’70s. In its heyday, Falconbridge’s copper mine, based just up the road in the small town of Kilembe, was the churning engine of Uganda’s economy. The mine once employed more than 6,000 people and accounted for nearly a third of the country’s GDP.
Falconbridge was chased out of Uganda by Idi Amin in 1977, who nationalized the mine in the final years of his rule, convinced that his government could run it as well as the Canadians and keep more of the copper’s value at home. By 1982, it was shuttered.
In Kilembe, Falconbridge’s ghostly remains are ubiquitous. Decaying company housing is still occupied by former employees and their descendants. Rickety mining infrastructure dots the hillside. The tailings pools stand as monuments to what was once taken from here and sent northward to feed the booming engines of Western capitalism’s golden age.
A toxic legacy is now seeping from these pools and into water, soil and bodies in this region, as the Nyamwamba bursts its banks with flooding increasing frequency. Global warming has disturbed the climate above the mountains on high — during the rainy season, floods have become more common. As the Nyamwamba’s floodwaters rage past the tailings pools like this one every year, toxic heavy metals are being washed downriver toward the district capital of Kasese and its 100,000 residents.
In Kilembe, the toll is already evident. Cancer rates have skyrocketed. Spurred along by the burning of fossil fuels in faraway locales, the wounds of extraction in this area have begun to fester and become gangrenous.
“When we were starting our study in the Kilembe mine area, [this] whole tailing dump was not touched by water,” said Abraham Mwesigye, an environmental scientist at Kampala’s Makerere University. “But because of over flooding, we’ve lost tons and tons of tailing waste into River Nyamwamba … and that has only happened in the last four years when the effects of climate change increased in the Rwenzori Mountains.”
Pools of menace
In all, there are 15 million metric tons of copper tailings in the area around Kilembe. A decade ago, Mwesigye and his colleagues began to investigate their impact on health and the environment. In the period since, study after study have shown startling results.
Copper, cobalt, arsenic, nickel, zinc and lead is everywhere. There’s nickel in the cassava and beans grown along the Nyamwamba’s banks. Copper concentrations are several times higher than average in people’s toenails. In more than half of the samples taken of drinking water near Kilembe and downstream in 2017, there were unsafe levels of cobalt. The soil is contaminated, dust found inside of people’s homes is toxic, and even the grasses that livestock and wild animals graze on show elevated traces of heavy metals.
The concentrations are particularly high, often dangerously so, near Kilembe. But they can also be found further downriver, near the more populous town of Kasese.
“Over times these wastes have been eroded into farms and the River Nyamwamba, which is a main water source for locals,” Mwesigye said in a phone interview with Mongabay. “The danger is that they contain heavy metals, including those which are very toxic. We’re looking at copper, cobalt, zinc, arsenic, manganese and iron. We tested and found more than 42 elements in those wastes, and they are ending up in drinking water supplies and agriculture.”
Some of the elements washing into the Nyamwamba are carcinogenic. Cobalt, for example, was recently escalated by the European Commission as a Class 1B risk, meaning excessive exposure to it is almost certain to cause cancer. Samples of yams grown near Kilembe in 2019 showed levels of cobalt that exceeded the safe limit for children in particular.
“Cobalt is the second most abundant contaminant within Kilembe after copper,” Mwesigye said.
These toxins are causing a silent but growing health crisis in Kilembe, he added.
“We surveyed the Kilembe hospitals and health facilities, and we found that there are high rates of cancer and gastrointestinal diseases, both of which are associated with exposure.”
There have been no definitive studies linking the prevalence of heavy metals in Kilembe and Kasese with elevated cancer rates — yet. But media reports suggest these rates are higher than average compared with other parts of Uganda. Municipal officials in Kasese say they suspect the tailing pools are to blame, with toxins showing up in the produce people eat.
“We are afraid that the increase in cancer in the area might partly be caused by the water [used to grow food],” said Chance Kahindo, Kasese’s mayor.
Mwesigye’s findings have been backed up by other researchers. In a 2020 study published in the Octa Journal of Environmental Research, samples taken from the Nyamwamba near Kilembe were shown to have levels of copper and cobalt that exceeded safe limits set by the World Health Organization. Tissue samples taken from the river’s fish, a crucial source of local food, were also recorded as having accumulated unsafe amounts of cobalt, lead and zinc.
Environmental advocates say it’s almost certain that the metals are also affecting wildlife in Queen Elizabeth National Park, a sprawling nature reserve that the Nyamwamba cuts through on its way into Lake George. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the park is home to lions, buffalo, leopards, hippos and African savanna elephants.
“These copper tailings end up journeying into the water,” said Edwin Mumbere, director of a Kasese-based environmental group. “So there’s heavy metal pollution that isn’t only affecting us as a community, it’s affecting animals [in the park].”
As far back as 2003, a study showed higher-than-normal concentrations of copper and zinc in Lake George, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) downstream of Kilembe, including in the fish that feed tens of thousands of people in the region. The levels detected in their flesh were considered safe for human consumption — but that was before the Nyamwamba’s floods started getting worse and more frequent.
In 2022, a researcher with the Uganda Cancer Institute told a journalist that cancer cases from Kasese “seem to be increasing,” but the link between health problems in the region and the prevalence of heavy metals hasn’t been thoroughly studied. According to unpublished data shared with Mongabay by the Kampala-based Uganda Cancer Institute, a recent study did not show higher-than-average rates of cancer in Kasese district as a whole. But the figures covered the district’s full 800,000-strong population, and hadn’t been disaggregated to evaluate rates among those living in the city of Kasese or other settlements between Kilembe and Lake George.
“Foods that are grown in Kilembe are sold all over Kasese town,” Mwesigye said. “So there’s a likelihood that residents of Kasese are consuming contaminated foods … and when there’s flooding, you’ll find the tailings there, because the River Nyamwamba busts its banks and spreads waste all over.”
For people in the region who do contract cancer, wherever it comes from, a painful ordeal often awaits. If they don’t have the money to pay for treatment in one of Kampala’s specialized private wards, there’s little they can do besides wait for the disease to consume them. Media reports speak of stricken patients slowly dying at home without receiving proper care.
Old scars reopened by new wounds
The toxins coursing through the life systems of Kilembe have produced a catastrophe that’s both urgent and, at least for now, part of the fabric of life. There’s no choice: even as the waters rise and the poisons soak deeper into it every year, people who call the Nyamwamba’s banks home must adjust. It isn’t a unique situation. As ecologies change and the bill for the 20th century comes due, people closest to that debt often don’t have any option other than to try and work around it.
Across the African continent, as well as in other places whose forests and mines fed the engine of global growth, there are wounds, infected and seeping even when the hands that opened them are long gone.
“We’re still in the extractive phase in countries in Latin America and Africa, but the problem will be in a century when they will have the legacies,” said Flaviano Bianchini, director of Source International, an NGO that campaigns on behalf of mining-affected communities. “The cost of cleaning the pollution caused by a mine is huge, enormous. Millions and millions and millions [of dollars].”
In Africa, these legacies are already festering. In Uganda’s neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo, a copper mine owned by the Swiss multinational Glencore in Lualaba province has rendered farmland unusable and poisoned local waterways. In 2022, the company agreed to pay $180 million to the country after admitting that it spent more than a decade bribing senior officials there.
Further south, in Zambia, children born in the town of Kabwe, which hosted a lead mine operated by the British giant Anglo-American between 1925 and 1974, can have blood lead levels as high as 20 times the safe limit. Kilembe isn’t an outlier — it’s the norm.
Some public interest lawyers are trying to turn the tide and hold companies accountable. But they face an uphill battle. In December, a South African court threw out a case that the U.K.-based firm Leigh Day brought against Anglo-American over the damage it left behind in Kabwe.
The court said that by trying to force Anglo-American to pay for the mess, the plaintiffs wanted to “advance an untenable claim that would set a grave precedent.”
While Leigh Day is currently working towards appealing the ruling, it symbolized the difficulties that communities face in African courts when they take on mining giants or governments. Impunity has taken a toll.
“When it comes to the harm that has been suffered by workers and communities, the lack of access to justice locally has meant a lack of deterrence and an insufficient incentive on companies to behave better,” said Richard Meeran, the lead attorney from Leigh Day on the Kabwe case.
When companies pack up and leave, whether because a mine has been depleted, the operation has become financially unviable, or over a dispute with the government, it’s the people who live nearby — those with the least resources — who are left holding with the bill.
“Legal systems must evolve to hold companies accountable,” Marcos Orellana, the U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, said in an email to Mongabay. “And courts must be open and willing to hold past polluters accountable for the harm they have caused to communities and the environment.”
It won’t do much good for anyone living in Kilembe or Kasese to knock on Falconbridge’s door. In 2006, it was acquired by the Swiss-Anglo firm Xstrata, in a $22.5 billion deal that was one of the biggest in Canadian history at the time. A few years later, Xstrata was taken over by Glencore, the world’s largest commodities trader. According to company data, in 2022 Glencore posted a record profit of $17.3 billion, paying more than $7 billion to its shareholders.
In an email to Mongabay, Glencore declined to comment on Falconbridge’s legacy in Uganda.
Despite its noxious aftermath, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has spent the better part of a decade trying to restart copper mining in Kilembe. After an embarrassing episode in which a Chinese company took control of the mine only to lose its contract due to inactivity and unpaid fees, the Ugandan government has found new suitors. Late last year, Kilembe hosted a delegation to showcase the infrastructure Falconbridge left behind. Media reports suggest a new deal may be approaching.
If a new owner is found, it’s unclear what, if anything, they will do about the tailings pools and their grim legacy.
In the meantime, the people who live along the Nyamwamba River are caught between two ecological crises at once, separate yet linked. From above, a warming atmosphere robs them of the sacred sites and steals their homes in rushing flooding waters. At the same time, poisons from the scarred earth seep deeper into their food, water and bodies. From both directions the consequences of extraction, and in neither any relief in sight.
That environmental wounds from a fast-approaching future are dovetailing with those of western Uganda’s unresolved past carries an ominous message. The climate crisis is not set to arrive on its own. It will have company.
Indigenous custodians from Benin, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia have released a powerful new statement outlining the importance of sacred natural sites and governance systems.
Emerging out of a biocultural diversity revival movement that’s starting to build serious momentum across continental Africa, the statement forms the heart of a new report that builds the case for the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to do its part.
The new report, authored by The Gaia Foundation, African Biodiversity Network and human rights lawyer Roger Chennels, draws attention to the way that sacred natural sites and their community custodians have been systematically undermined and violated since the colonial era. Despite the official decolonization of Africa, this persecution continues today, say the authors, who have extensively documented the renewed scramble for Africa’s land, mineral, metal and fossil fuel wealth and its impact on Indigenous territories.
Sabella Kaguna, a sacred site custodian from Tharaka, Kenya, with a map of her ancestral territory and indigenous seeds (Photo: The Gaia Foundation)
Both the custodians and the report’s authors are now urging the African Commission to invoke the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (African Charter). and protect sacred sites, governance systems and custodians in a ‘decisive policy and legislative response’ to these threats.
SACRED NATURAL SITES
SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE, CULTURE AND LAW
According to the new report, sacred sites are “Places of ecological, cultural and spiritual importance, embedded in ancestral lands”. They also play an important role in community conflict resolution practices and other traditions central to the cultural life of Indigenous Peoples.In their statement custodians describe the centrality of sacred sites to their existence, writing that “Sacred natural sites are where we come from, the heart of life. They are our roots and our inspiration. We cannot live without our sacred natural sites, and we are responsible for protecting them.”
Sacred site custodians from Bale Ethiopia. (Photo :Tamara Korur)
The custodians go on to outline in detail how sacred natural sites are the primary source of their laws and customary governance systems. Drawing together a list of common customary laws, the custodians demonstrate how these governance systems enable Indigenous Peoples to both protect their territories and maintain their ways of life and identities.
Quoting Beninese custodian Ousso Lio Appolinaire on the relationship between nature and culture, the report’s authors emphasize that a priori laws based upon and derived from the laws of the Earth underpin the great diversity of laws and customs practiced by Indigenous Peoples worldwide.
“In the beginning there was Nature; culture and indigenous knowledge come from Nature. Nature cannot be protected in a sustainable way without the culture of that place. The erosion of culture leads to the destruction of Nature. It is critical to conserve the culture and knowledge of our ancestors for good ecological governance in service of Nature”, says Appolinaire.
The custodians’ are calling for the African Commission to recognize and protect sacred natural sites on the basis that they are the foundations of the governance systems, cultures and values celebrated and enshrined in the African Charter.
The report discusses at length the commitment the African Charter makes to recognizing Africa’s legal plurality, including Indigenous People’s customary governance systems. Laying out a broad vision for an Africa free of colonialism, Articles 17, 18 and 61 of the Charter promote plurality and the traditional cultural values that, for custodian communities, are intimately tied to the existence and health of sacred natural sites.
In order to safeguard these rights, sacred natural sites must be protected, and the customary governance systems connected to them honored, argues the report.
LOSING LAND AND MEMORY
SACRED SITES UNDER THREAT
The custodian’s statement intimates a critical need to protect sacred natural sites in accordance with the African Charter due to the interconnected crises of disappearing knowledge and increasingly devastated ecosystems.
VhaVenda community members and their ecological calendar in Venda Limpopo. (Photo: Will Baxter)
“We are deeply concerned about our Earth because she is suffering from increasing destruction despite all the discussions, international meetings, facts and figures and warning signs from Earth… the future of our children and the children of all the species of Earth are threatened. When this last generation of elders dies, we will lose the memory of how to live respectfully on the planet, if we do not learn from them now,” say the custodians.
As remedy, the custodians describe a litany of destructive and disrespectful practices that sacred natural sites ought to be legally protected from. These include unwanted tourism, research and documentation, the use of non-indigenous seeds, land grabbing and financial speculation.
Special attention is given to the problem of extractivism, with custodians declaring sacred natural sites to be ‘No Go Areas’ for mining and other forms of destructive ‘development’. They write that “Sacred natural sites are not for making money. Our children need a healthy planet with clean air, water and food from healthy soils. They cannot eat money as food or breathe money or drink money. If there is no water, there is no life.”
“In my country sacred sites are holy places, they are not a place for infrastructural development. Those sites are kept by the community”, says Sabella Kaguna, a custodian from Tharaka in Kenya and one of the statement’s authors.
In order to ensure custodian communities are empowered to protect sacred sites on their own terms, the custodians are seeking legal parity. They write that they have observed how the dominant legal system in their home nations is operationalized to legitimize the destruction of sacred natural sites in contravention of their own laws and customs.
This trend has been recognized by the African Commission’s own Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations. In a 2010 report the group described how “Indigenous communities in Kenya, like most others in Africa, often rely on their African customary law. However, Kenya’s legal framework subjugates African customary law to written laws. […] African customary law is placed at the bottom of the applicable laws”.
The report draws attention to examples of ‘multi-juridicial’ legal systems from around the world as examples of how indigenous legal traditions can be given greater parity. Describing the African Charter as ‘replete’ with references with legal pluralism and the need to respect ancestral legal systems, it makes the case for more wide-ranging and robust protection of these systems in African nations under the Charter.
A REVIVAL GATHERS PACE
Though the custodians’ statement calls for new actions from the African Commission and member states, at the grassroots level Indigenous custodian communities have been taking active steps to protect sacred natural sites for a number of years.
The report shares a number of case studies that showcase the success Indigenous communities have had in protecting sacred sites so far.
Meeting of sacred site custodians at Lake Langano, Ethiopia 2015 (Photo: The Gaia Foundation)
Benin is home to a network of sacred natural sites, known as Vodun zun, including over 2,940 sacred forests. In 2012, due in large part to the work of Indigenous-led organization GRABE-Benin, Benin set a new precedent by creating a ‘sacred forest law’ (Interministerial Order No.0121). The law formally protects sacred forests, recognizing their importance for biodiversity and ethno-cultural traditions.
Since that time GRABE-Benin has accompanied communities to apply for registration and legal recognition of their sacred forests as protected areas, as well as recognition of the communities’ rights to govern and protect them. By the end of 2013, a total of nine sacred forests had been formally protected.
Sheka Forest (Photo: Will Baxter)
In the Sheka region of Southern Ethiopia, a region famous for rare afromontane forests, Shekacho communities have made great strides to protect the area’s 200+ sacred natural sites from threats such as deforestation.
With assistance from MELCA-Ethiopia, a local NGO, the communities have begun to revitalize their traditional culture, and clans have united to seek protection for sacred sites. As a result of these efforts, Sheka Forest was recognized as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2012. Since then, the regional government has issued a regulation for the protection of the Sheka forest Biosphere Reserve.
These successes are part of a wider process of Indigenous cultural revival under way across Africa. The report describes how communities such as those in Sheka and Benin are coming together to rebuild their cultural identities and customary governance systems. In doing so, they are challenging dominant legal systems that continue in the colonial vein of legitimizing eco-cultural destruction, rather than preventing it.
A new film from the report’s authors provides greater insight into this ongoing revival. In the film, Method Gundidza of the Mupo Foundation (South Africa) describes the critical importance of customary governance at a time of multiple eco-social crises:
“We are saying that law should derive from nature. And if law should derive from nature, customary governance systems are the law. This is where it (law) should come from. These are the (Indigenous) people whose day-to-day lives reflect how to live with nature and how to care for nature.”
The custodians and their supporters now hope their statement will impress this key insight upon the African Commission and inspire them to action. In the meantime, they will continue with their quiet revolution.
Indigenous people around the world are among the most vulnerable to climate change and are increasingly susceptible to the pathogen loads found in potable water after heavy rainfall or rapid snow melt.
These are the preliminary findings of Sherilee Harper, a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Aboriginal People’s Health at the University of Guelph, who says that there has been a significant increase in the incidence of diarrhea and vomiting following these weather events.
Harper is undertaking a comparative study of how extreme weather events affect waterborne diseases in the Arctic and in southwestern Uganda—and is finding plenty of similarities between health issues faced by indigenous groups in Uganda and those in Inuit Nunangat.
“There are a lot of similarities,” she says. “One of the most significant is caused by changes to the climate; in both places, increased temperatures and rainfall are leading to increased bacterial loads in water. This can be because of heavy rainfall or rapid snowmelt, but, in each case, it leads to an increased risk of exposure to waterborne disease from both tap water and brook water.”
With climate change, these weather events are expected to increase in frequency, duration and intensity, in turn increasing the risk of disease. As a result, the risks associated with some centuries-old practices may be changing. For example, when Inuit go hunting or to cabins, they use water from brooks and streams or melt ice. Harper’s research shows that this water can have a negative impact on their health.
“After a heavy rainfall, there is an increase in E. coli and total coliforms in the water, which means there is an increased risk of exposure to these bacteria,” says Harper. “In Nunatsiavut, where I started this research, clinic records showed a significant increase in cases of vomiting and diarrhea after these high-impact weather events.”
Harper’s research indicates that water issues such as these are not likely to diminish in the near future.
“Under any climate change scenario you consider, this is going to increase,” she says. “Waterborne diseases are not just an Arctic issue; they are global. The World Health Organization projects that most of the climate change disease burden in the 21st century will be due to diarrhea and malnutrition.”
Harper’s comparative research also takes her to Uganda, where she is studying how climate events similar to those affecting Canada’s North are affecting Batwa peoples’ health. The Batwa are conservation refugees who were moved out of their forest homeland when the Ugandan government made it a national park to protect the silverback gorillas.
“The Batwa face similar social and societal issues to the Inuit, of which one of the most important is access to safe drinking water,” she says. “Comparing the two cultures allows me to examine similarities between two seemingly different populations and start addressing a deficit in understanding of the health dimensions of climate change among indigenous populations. This information can then be used to offer best practice guidelines and develop adaptation strategies in an indigenous context.”
Harper will discuss her research and answer questions from the press as part of the Canada Press Breakfast on the Arctic and oceans, being held at the 178th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The breakfast will be held in Room 306 of the Vancouver Convention Centre at 8 a.m. on February 17, 2012, and will feature Canadian research experts from across natural sciences, engineering, health, social sciences and humanities.
