The town motto of Aklavik, an Arctic hamlet huddled at the Mackenzie River Delta in the Northwest Territories, is “Never Say Die.” So when the close-knit community of 600 noticed an alarming trend—a high number of people were getting sick with stomach cancer—they decided to act. “In the past, we hardly ever buried anyone except elders. The graveyard wasn’t touched for so long,” says child-care worker Annie Buckle, 54. Now, “there’s a new gravesite. You’d be surprised by the dates [on the headstones].” Buckle says she lost her mother to stomach cancer last year.
The culprit, residents believed, was a common bacteria: Helicobacter pylori. The spiral-shaped bug, which lives in the human stomach or intestine, is a major cause of gastric cancer and peptic ulcer disease. (Gastric cancer is the second most common cancer among Inuit men, but ranks 10th overall for Canadian men.) So, the community invited a medical team from Edmonton and Yellowknife to investigate. In February, 27 doctors, nurses and researchers descended on Aklavik, surveying 314 people and endoscoping 193. Among 255 people given a breath test for H. pylori, 57 per cent came back positive. Buckle was one of them: she took a preventative 10-day course of antibiotics to rid herself of the bug. All who tested positive, symptomatic or not, will be offered treatment.
Humans have lived with H. pylori for over 50,000 years. Now, across the developed world, it’s rapidly going extinct. A century ago, it’s thought that nearly everyone had it in their stomachs; today, thanks to clean water, better hygiene and antibiotics, just five per cent of people born in the 1990s do, according to one U.S. study. (The bacteria, which is transmitted orally or fecally, is more prevalent in rural and developing areas.) The bene?ts of eradicating H. pylori have been great. “Ulcer disease is going away; stomach cancer is going away,” says Dr. Martin Blaser, chair of the Department of Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine, whose work was instrumental in linking H. pylori to gastric cancer. But as those ailments disappear, “new diseases are rising,” he adds.
And the loss of H. pylori could be partly to blame. A growing body of research suggests the bug might not just cause ulcers and cancer—it could actually prevent some diseases, too. As H. pylori is wiped out, a host of health problems are on the rise: more than half of the population in Canada is now overweight or obese. Over 15 per cent of kids aged four to 11 suffer from childhood asthma. Six million Canadians have gastroesophageal reflux disease (better known as GERD), when stomach contents splash up into the esophagus. Could the much-maligned bacteria actually protect against these conditions? Blaser believes it might. “If the world is more complicated than what was originally proposed, then so be it,” he says. “The question is, what’s the truth?”
