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Health

During the 19th century, the Western Arctic suffered a population decline of close to 90 per cent, resulting from exposure to new diseases, including tuberculosis, measles, influenza, and smallpox. Autopsies near Greenland reveal that, more commonly pneumonia, kidney diseases, trichinosis, malnutrition, and degenerative disorders may have contributed to mass deaths among different Inuit tribes. Inuit believed that the causes of the disease were of a spiritual origin.

Canadian churches and, eventually, the federal government ran the earliest health facilities for Inuit population, whether fully segregated hospitals or "annexes" and wards attached to settler hospitals. These " Indian hospitals " were focused on treating people for tuberculosis, though diagnosis was difficult and treatment involved forced removal of individuals from their communities for in-patient confinement in other parts of the country.

Dr. Kevin Patterson, a physician, wrote an op-ed in The Globe and Mail: "In October (2017) the federal Minister of Indigenous Services, Jane Philpott, announced that in 2015 tuberculosis... Was 270 times... More common among the Canadian Inuit than it is among non-Indigenous southern Canadians." The Canadian Medical Association Journal published in 2013 that "tuberculosis among Canadian Inuit has dramatically increased since 1997. In 2010 the incidence in Nunavut... Was 304 per 100,000—more than 66 times the rate seen in the general population.