Gas sniffing and lead poisoning may be causing indigenous suicides across generations: Toronto researchers – National Post
March 1, 2017
It was 1973, and federal epidemiologist Dr. John Davies was concerned by what he saw among northwestern Ontario’s aboriginal population.
Gas sniffing seemed widespread, he wrote a colleague at the Sioux Lookout hospital, and tests showed young sniffers had as much as 17 times the level of lead in their blood as could inflict brain damage.
Four decades later, the fallout from that abuse may still be taking a lethal — and surprising — toll, actually helping fuel Canada’s epidemic of First Nations suicide, suggest researchers who unearthed the letter recently.
They theorize in a just-published paper in the journal Psychiatry Research that gas-sniffing and other sources of lead poisoning in the 1970s and 1980s triggered genetic changes in the users, which in turn may have been passed on to their children, a process called epigenetics.
