Circumpolar Health

This volume presents in tightly edited form more than ninety papers from the third international symposium on circumpolar health, held in Yellowknife in July 1974.

The conference brought together physicians and paramedical professionals from all the circumpolar nations. They discussed methods of delivering health care and education to isolated communities, the epidemiology and pathology of current epidemics, and the many physiological, social, psychological, and medical problems arising from the sudden acculturation of indigenous northern peoples to a western life-style.

Physiologists and nutritionists will be interested in the effects of changes from natural to processed foods and of diminished levels of physical activity; sociologists and psychologists in adaptations to rapid social change and the attendant problems of alcoholism and violence; epidemiologists in the spread and subsequent control of bacteria, viruses, and parasites previously unknown in northern communities; physicians in such common northern problems as upper respiratory and each infections; dental surgeons in the impact of changing foods on oral health; and geneticists and anthropologists in the potential for study of small communities of a common basic stock which have lived in isolation for many centuries.

Many of the problems encountered by white workers in the north -- exposure to cold, venereal disease, unusual rhythms of light and darkness, responses to isolation, and even relationships between isolated professionals and their university-based supervisors -- are also discussed.