Backlash against a whistle-blower : Melbourne Indymedia

THE ENVIRONMENT: HEALTH AND SAFETY
Saturday, May 19, 2007

FORT CHIPEWYAN, ALTA. -- When John O'Connor, a diminutive and soft- spoken Irish-born family physician, began his weekly visits to Fort
Chipewyan, a picturesque community on the shores of Lake Athabasca,
he never expected that eight years later he would be fighting for his
professional life.

Located near Wood Buffalo National Park and once Canada's richest fur-
trading post, Fort Chipewyan looks like an idyllic place. But the
elders soon started to tell their new doctor stories of deformed fish
and bleeding muskrats and how an unusually high number of local
people had been "taken with cancer."

Dr. O'Connor says he couldn't help but wonder what was happening in
the settlement of 1,000 that sits near the mouth of the Athabasca
River about 300 kilometres downstream from the largest capital
project in the world: the northern Alberta oil sands. In 2005 alone,
half the community's 14 deaths were due to various cancers.

"Is it genetics, lifestyle, the environment or just bad luck?" he
recalls asking himself. "What's going on? Where could the origin be?"
He had practised medicine in Fort McMurray, at the heart of the oil
sands, since 1993, and had never seen such problems in the city. "I
can't explain it."

Since then, his concern for the health of his native patients has led
to many sleepless nights as well as an open battle with the Alberta
government over the lack of medical resources in the ser-
vice-challenged Northern Lights Health Region, where 14 family
doctors care for 80,000 people. Now, he finds himself the subject of
an unusual investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of

Alberta that could compromise his future. A ruling could come down at
any moment, and he feels that he's in such dire straits that he has
decided to pack up and leave the province altogether.

The hunters, trappers, fishermen and oil-sand workers of "Fort Chip"
seem flummoxed by what's happening to their doctor, who works 80
hours a week, but his colleagues feel the case is politically
motivated. "This is not about shutting up John; this is about
shutting him down," charges Dr. Michel Sauvé, a respected Fort
McMurray internist. "There should be whistle-blowing protection for
doctors."

And that seems to be the root of the problem. As well as asking
pointed questions about cancer causes, Dr. O'Connor, the region's
chief of family medicine, has spent much of the past few years
criticizing the shortage of medical resources as well as the carnage
on the road to Fort McMurray, a stretch so deadly it has become known
as Hell's Highway.

Yet he didn't start to speak up in earnest about his patients in Fort
Chip until 2004, when he diagnosed a middle-aged patient with a very
rare bile-duct cancer known as cholangiocarcinoma. He knew it well
because his father had died of the same disease in Ireland. "It's
vicious and fast."

It's also strongly associated with chemical pollution, including
arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs, a group of
carcinogens discharged by oil-sand mining, which now produces a
million barrels of oil a day - half the nation's gasoline supply -
and gives Ottawa more than $6-billion a year in taxes.

Normally, this form of cancer occurs in one in 100,000 people. So,
when Dr. O'Connor found another case the following year, as well as
clusters of immune-system disorders, in a community of just 1,000
people, he called for an independent study. "Am I seeing a problem,
or am I not?" he asked officials.

He wasn't the first to ask for a study. The fact that uranium mines,
now abandoned, pulp mills and the oil sands have flushed chemicals
into Lake Athabasca for decades prompted scientists to seek a survey
of health in the region in 1999. Three years later, two Fort McMurray

doctors asked again for a comprehensive health study on behalf of
several first nations.

Finally, in 2004, Alberta's oil regulator, the Energy and Utility
Board, recommended a study. But Alberta Health and Health Canada
started working on one only after a CBC reporter asked Dr. O'Connor
early last year why there were so many cases of cancer in Fort Chip.
The story made The National, and five months later the agencies
released a statistical analysis, albeit one that had not undergone a
peer review, which kept it from being deemed first-rate research.

The report found that, from 1995 to 2005, the community's cancer
rates "were comparable to the provincial average," although officials
agreed the incidence of bile-duct cancers -- by this point, five
cases in the North Lights alone -- was "provocative."

Dr. O'Connor challenged the thoroughness of the analysis while people
in Fort Chipewyan expressed deep skepticism. In response, Alberta
Health accused him of having withheld cancer reports. "Either there
is no evidence, or he has decided to ignore the law," charged
provincial spokesman Howard May.

Expressing disbelief at the charge, Dr. O'Connor said: "I haven't
received any requests for information. I don't know what they are
talking about."

In an independent analysis, well-known Alberta ecologist and
statistician Kevin Timoney also found the provincial study to be
deeply flawed.

"It's difficult to find a significant result in a small sample size,"
he explained. Because missing just one case would skew the results,
"statistics offer a blunt tool for detection of elevated cancer
rates" in such a small community.

Mr. Timoney also found widespread evidence of chemical contamination
in the Athabasca River. According to data collected by a government
and industry group known as the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program
(RAMP), the levels of PAHs in the river's sediment now resemble those
found at highly contaminated sites in the United States.

A RAMP report last year also found that 7.4 per cent of fish from the
river had growth abnormalities. "That's high," says Mr. Timoney, who
is now conducting an extensive water-quality study for the
community's local health board.

Frustrated by government unwillingness to conduct a proper health
study, Dr. O'Connor announced in December that he plans to leave Fort

McMurray this summer and move to Nova Scotia. Then he caused an even bigger sensation by writing in an emotional letter to Halifax's
Chronicle Herald newspaper that life in Fort McMurray is
"intolerable." He also warned Atlantic Canada workers not to expect
to come west and find a family doctor or affordable housing when they
get here. "The quality of life," he said, "is extremely low."

Because of the letter, Dr. O'Connor admits, "a lot of people in
administration thought I was the worst thing that had happened to the
town." After all, the provincial government was in the middle of a
campaign to recruit more health-care workers to a region that it says
has "the most severe" gaps in care.

Within weeks, three employees of Health Canada, one from Alberta
Health and another from Environment Canada had filed a complaint
against Dr. O'Connor with the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
According to one source, the bureaucrats have accused him of
"irresponsible actions" and "raising undue alarm among the public."
His concerns about contamination, they said, have left the people of
Fort Chipewyan "fearful of the places they live in and their
traditional foods."

Asked why government employees would take such a drastic step, a
Health Canada spokesperson stated via an e-mail simply that health
professionals of all sorts are obliged to report on "professional
practice issues."

However, the timing of the complaint has led Dr. Sauvé and other
local doctors and nurses to conclude that the federal and provincial
governments wanted to silence an outspoken critic of the area's
industrial growth. The college normally reviews complaints made by
patients, Dr. Sauvé explains, and shouldn't be used as "a state tool
for censoring doctors."

The "fearful" people of Fort Chipewyan, meanwhile, contend that they
have voiced concerns about cancer rates and water pollution for
years. When the wind is right, they can smell the oil-sands plants,
and now carry filtered water into the bush when hunting.

Margaret Simpson, a 60-year-old Dene and Catholic lay priest, says
that in 2005 she often buried two people a week. "What is happening
here? It drove me nuts," she says, describing Dr. O'Connor as her
friend as well as her physician.

"It's not fair what's happening to him. Maybe they are trying to keep
him quiet about something they don't want known."

Raymond Ladouceur, a 65-year-old commercial fisherman who says he
routinely pulls deformed fish from the lake, echoes her sentiment.
"These guys who accuse him of agitating the community should
apologize. Let O'Connor do his job. He is concerned about life and we
support him. The whole community does."

Five years ago, Mr. Ladouceur says, he sent 200 pounds of pickerel
riddled with tumours, bulging eyes, crooked tails and pushed-in faces
to Fort McMurray for testing he hoped would determine what has been
going wrong.

But provincial officials didn't pick up the fish, he says, and they
were left to rot in a truck.

Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning Calgary journalist. Next month,
he will be among the speakers at an Alberta Environmental Network
conference on water in the Athabasca Basin, as will Dr. John
O'Connor.

Another case of Corporate Criminals causing cancer to profit !