Mercury levels higher in Grassy Narrows residents who died young, new study finds

Key evidence sitting in government database since the late 1990s

By David Bruser Toronto Star

The people of Grassy Narrows First Nation have long faced doubts that the industrial mercury dumped upstream made them sick.

Despite their tremors, slurred speech, impaired hearing, tunnel vision and lost muscle co-ordination, doctors and governments have been reluctant to acknowledge the symptoms were caused by the neurotoxin.

Now, Chief Rudy Turtle says, they have the kind of evidence that skeptics will find tough to ignore.

The study published Monday in the journal Lancet Planetary Health concludes that Grassy Narrows residents who prematurely died before the age of 60 had five times more mercury in their body over the years they were studied, compared to those who lived to be older than 60.

“This confirms what we have long known in our hearts. Mercury has taken our loved ones from us long before their time,” Turtle said.

The key evidence had been there all along, sitting in a government database since the late 1990s.

Between 1970 and 1997, federal government workers took thousands of samples of hair and blood from 657 Grassy Narrows residents. The results were shared with individuals when the mercury reading prompted a caution to limit their intake of fish, a staple of the community’s diet.

A local resident catches a fish in the Wabigoon River. Scientists strongly suspect that old mercury still contaminates the mill site upstream and pollutes the river.

But until last year, no one had used the entire biomonitoring data set to look for any community mortality trends.

After reviewing death records from the band council, researchers Aline Philibert and Donna Mergler from the Université du Québec à Montréal and Myriam Fillion from Université TÉLUQ zeroed in on 36 pairs of people. Each pair consisted of someone who died before age 60 and someone who lived beyond 60, and both were the same gender and born around the same time — before the mercury dumping in the 1960s.

The researchers chose age 60 as the cutoff because even though population surveys in Canada classify premature death as dying before age 75, there aren’t enough remaining Grassy Narrows residents that age to make a meaningful study.

The researchers made another troubling finding when they looked at mercury levels in the 154 residents who were born in August 1959 or earlier and who died by August 2019: As the levels of the neurotoxin in their hair went up, their years of life went down.

“For the deceased individuals, longevity decreased by one year with every 6.25 (parts per million) increase in hair (mercury) concentration.”

During the 1960s, the Dryden pulp and paper mill, operated by Reed Paper, dumped 10 tonnes of mercury into the Wabigoon River that feeds Grassy Narrows and nearby Wabaseemoong (Whitedog) Independent Nations.

The potent neurotoxin contaminated the river’s fish and poisoned the people who ate them.

The robust fishing tourism industry, especially at famous Ball Lake Lodge, was decimated. The commercial fishermen and guides went on welfare.

Over the past three years, the Star and scientists have revealed that fish near Grassy Narrows remain the most contaminated in the province, that there are mercury-contaminated soil and river sediments at or near the site of the old mill, and that the provincial government knew in the 1990s that mercury was visible in soil under that site and never told anyone in Grassy Narrows or Whitedog.

Scientists strongly suspect that old mercury still contaminates the mill site and pollutes the river. They have determined there are two likely sources of the mercury found in the riverbed:

The first is mercury that was initially dumped in the river in the 1960s but may have been trapped in the riverbanks or sediment beds outside the plant only to be released downstream over time during high flows or other disturbances.

Erica Fisher, from Whitedog reserve, told the Star in 2018 that she experiences dizziness and gets the shakes. Her hands often turn numb, as if they have fallen asleep. She remembers fishing as a young child, spending entire days on the water.

The second likely source is legacy mercury that has leaked from the mill property into the river — a scenario found at other North American industrial sites that once used mercury in production processes.

In December 2018, after a survey of 350 children ages four to 17, she and her team revealed that children whose mothers ate fish at least once a week while pregnant are four times more likely to have a learning disability or nervous system disorder that was slowing their efforts in school. Those kids were compared to Grassy Narrows children whose mothers hardly ever ate fish. Children aged four to 11 had higher reported rates of ear infections, speech problems and learning disabilities compared to those reported by parents of other First Nations children.

Earlier that year, Mergler’s team found the adults of Grassy Narrows report higher rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts compared to other First Nations adults.

The latest research, focused exclusively on residents born before the mercury dumping, reveals another impact to the community: There are “fewer elders to pass on traditional teachings and knowledge,” Philibert, Mergler and Fillion said in their study of premature death.

Though the highest single mercury reading was found in a woman’s hair, men’s mercury hair concentration was more than seven times higher than the women’s overall.

Many of the men in the study group were fishing guides, Mergler said. Hair samples taken during the popular fishing seasons of summer and fall revealed significantly higher mercury concentrations, her team’s research found.

The researchers noted two limitations of the study:

There are no data from 1962 to 1970 when the mercury was dumped but when fish consumption was even higher because the community did not yet know about the pollution.

Chief Rudy Turtle speaks during a news conference at the AFN Special Chiefs Assembly in Ottawa on December 3, 2019.

The specific causes of death in the study group are not known. “The neurotoxic properties of (mercury) are well known and the resulting neurological and neuropsychiatric dysfunction could lead directly or indirectly to premature death,” the study said, adding that mercury exposure is associated with diabetes, hypertension and heart attacks, all known risk factors for premature death.

In 2017, the federal government suggested there was no evidence that mercury had disproportionately hurt the health of the people of Grassy Narrows.

“According to Health Canada, and their review of the health and mercury-related data accumulated over the past 45 years, there are no data to confirm whether there is a greater rate of disability or significant health problems, in comparison to other First Nations, in either Grassy Narrows or Wabaseemoong … at this time,” said an Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada fact sheet obtained by Grassy Narrows through access to information legislation.

While Mergler’s subsequent findings on child development and adult mental health showed a greater rate of problems in Grassy compared to other First Nations, her premature death study, based on analysis of data that had been held in Ottawa, did not make any comparisons to other First Nations.

“There can be no doubt that our people have been poisoned by mercury,” Turtle said. “And yet, more than 85 per cent of our people get no compensation for our loss … Nothing can take away this pain, but basic justice demands that we are all fully and fairly compensated.”

The Mercury Disability Board, set up in the mid-1980s to compensate those who can demonstrate symptoms consistent with mercury poisoning, has long been criticized as being inadequate. The criteria for payments are too restrictive and the amounts too low, critics have said. The provincial government recently participated in a sweeping review of the board and then retroactively indexed payments to inflation.

The premature death study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.