Type E Botulism: A Hazard of the North

N 1908, on returning after two years' absence to the head of the Mac- kenzie Delta, the explorer Stefansson (1929) learned that many of his Eskimo acquaintances were dead, including a group of eight "poisoned by eating the meat of a freshly killed white whale." Calamities of that sort were familiar to whalers and attributed by them to ptomaine poisoning; but Stefansson concluded this could scarcely be the cause, as he had seen tons of semi-decayed whale meat eaten without harm. He appears to have been the first to suggest that these mysterious fatalities might be due to trichinosis (Stefansson 1914). Twenty years later, Parnell (1934) also referred to "deaths of whole families which are periodically reported among the Eskimos." These were "always ascribed to 'ptomaine poisoning': without, however, any real evidence." Apparently unaware of Stefansson's prediction, Parnell specu- lated that the "Trichina worm", whose presence he had noted in arctic foxes and polar bears in the eastern Canadian Arctic, could be responsible for such deaths. These conjectures were later rendered plausible by parasite surveys of the fauna conducted by Thorborg et al. (1948) in Western Greenland, by Brown et al. (1949) in the Northwest Territories, and by Brandly and Rausch (1950) in Alaska, which established that Trichinella spiralis has a holarctic distribution. Connell (1949), in his review of the problem, indicates that the sled dog, and also certain wild carnivores, particularly the polar bear and the arctic fox, are liable to be infested; and that occasionally such marine mammals as the white whale (beluga), the walrus, and the bearded seal, somehow become hosts to Trichinella. There is now plenty of evidence that human trichinosis can occur in the Far North through consumption of the raw or inadequately cooked flesh of many of the above species. Without minimizing the seriousness of this risk of trichinosis, the present report draws attention to botulism as the probable explanation of many of the outbreaks of fatal poisonings to which Stefansson and Parnell referred. As the food habits of the natives of certain arctic and subarctic