Ottawa’s Bob Reid is trying to understand what’s at the root of the health crisis
Jump to full article: Ottawa (Ont) Citizen (ca), 2009-10-12
Author: Andrew Duffy, The Ottawa Citizen
Intro: When Ottawa’s Bob Reid convened a meeting several years ago to discuss Nunavut’s smoking epidemic, the territory’s health officials, Inuit elders and leaders all shared an overriding concern.
Nunavut’s expectant mothers smoked too much, they told him, and required urgent help.
“One of the things that was appalling to community members was the degree to which women continued to smoke throughout pregnancy,” says Reid, associate director of the rehabilitation centre at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute.
Reid, an expert in smoking cessation and behaviour modification, works with heart patients trying to break their addiction to tobacco.
About one-quarter of the 7,000 patients who visit the institute every year are smokers. (Smoking is a leading risk factor for heart disease.)
But the scale of the epidemic among Nunavut’s expectant mothers is of a different magnitude: studies show that up to 80 per cent of pregnant women in the territory smoke.
That level of tobacco use has profound effects on the health of Nunavut’s infants, who suffer the world’s highest rates of hospitalization for pneumonia, bronchiolitis and other respiratory infections.
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