Last year, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published an article on a case of scurvy diagnosed in an elderly woman in Toronto. It deserved attention because scurvy, a condition resulting from lack of vitamin C, is virtually never reported in advanced countries like Canada.
This year we have learned of 27 more cases, all diagnosed last year or this year, in the Lac La Ronge Indian Band in northern Saskatchewan.
Live without vitamin C for three or four months and you will begin to feel bad. You’ll be exhausted and irritable, and your arms and legs will hurt. Your gums will swell and start to bleed easily. Your teeth will loosen in their sockets, and you’ll have bad breath. Your skin will be rough and dry and will bruise easily. Wounds won’t heal quickly; in severe cases, old scars will open again. Left untreated, scurvy can result in internal bleeding, convulsions, organ failure and jaundice.
According to Food Banks Canada’s HungerCount 2024 report, food banks had two million visits last March — six per cent higher than in March 2023, and 90 per cent higher than in 2019.
A third of food bank users are children. Forty per cent of users are on social assistance or disability supports, and 18 per cent are currently employed — the highest percentage ever recorded.
The government provides medical care there already, and both detected and treated the scurvy situation. They aren’t shirking their duties on that front.
I don’t have any problem with them living there, if they want to do so they can go right ahead, but you can barely grow shit at 55N due to the length of the growing season, let alone with the lack of good soil at La Ronge, what kind of bullshit agricultural support do you think is even possible there? It’s not farm land, it will never be farmland.
If you want to live there like you did traditionally, maybe you should live there like you did traditionally.
The native peoples of that area already know how to prevent scurvy, so why aren’t they eating the local sources of Vitamin C? Probably because their people are not foraging and hunting sufficiently, or their population has grown too much for the local land to sustain them. Both of which are their own fault, not the governments.
If I moved out into the middle of nowhere with 100 people, I shouldn’t expect the government to start flying in a doctor and subsidizing flights of fresh vegetables to support us.