'My fighting queen': Nunavut baby in Edmonton hospital battling respiratory virus

An infant from Kugluktuk, Nunavut, remains on a respirator in an Edmonton hospital weeks after she first developed a fever and cough.

Tanya Napayok, the mother of six-month-old Gemma, said her daughter is fighting RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, and another lung infection.

"She's my fighting queen," Napayok said, speaking from the Larga Edmonton patient residence.

Napayok has stayed by her baby's side since early August, when Gemma first developed symptoms.

Then, "she just got worse," Napayok said.

They were medevaced first to Yellowknife and, from there, to Edmonton for more intensive care.

Fighting the two infections, Gemma needed to be on a respirator to help her breathe. That tube was removed recently, but was put back on because Gemma was still struggling.

Napayok's mother is now in Edmonton with her baby but her two-year-old son, who also came down with a less-severe case of RSV, is waiting back home in Kugluktuk.

High RSV rates

Research has shown that Nunavut has among the highest rates of hospitalizations for RSV in the world. 

Napayok's two children were among 13 residents in Kugluktuk, a hamlet of roughly 1,600 people, who were diagnosed with the virus between the last week of July and beginning of August, said Dr. Michael Patterson, the chief medical officer of Nunavut.

"The number of individuals who contracted or were diagnosed with RSV was higher than what we typically see in August," Patterson said.

This higher-than-usual number of infections could be due to improved testing for RSV or it could be a result of the relaxation of COVID-19 prevention measures in Nunavut, he said.

"We do recognize that the public health measures that we used as a response to COVID 19 also prevented a significant RSV spread for quite some time," Patterson said.

"We know that when we relaxed measures in the spring, that could have contributed to the abnormal spread of RSV in the summer because we didn't have any in the winter."

Nunavut typically runs an immunization program throughout the RSV season, which generally lasts from November to April, but Patterson said the health department started to see RSV numbers increase in late April.

By mid-May, the numbers were "much more noticeable in much of the territory," said Patterson.

That's when the government decided to restart its immunization program "to protect young infants at highest risk of severe infection," he said.

The program which typically provides up to five monthly doses of Palivizumab, better known as Synagis, throughout the RSV season, ended Aug. 15.

But Palivizumab was only earmarked for those at high risk.

Dr. Anna Banerji, an expert in Indigenous health, pediatrics and infectious disease at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health, has urged Palivizumab to be given to all Inuit babies.

Banerji studied respiratory infections in Inuit babies for decades, and found they occur 20 to 40 times as often as in non-Inuit, even when controlling for environmental factors.

Banerji said even Inuit infants who are not high-risk have 10 times the rates of hospital admission with RSV compared to the high-risk infants, and the symptoms are often more severe.

In 2019, Banerji started an online petition, which now has more than 200,000 signatures, asking Patterson and the Nunavut government to expand the immunization program to all infants.

That hasn't happened yet.

Banerji said the Kitikmeot region's most westerly community, Kugluktuk, "is one of the worst regions (or perhaps is the worst) region as far as RSV" but that the community tends to get overlooked by the Nunavut Government.

Banerji appears to be in agreement on one point with Patterson — that "the public health measures from COVID also protected people from RSV."

Patterson continues to still advise similar measures to keep RSV from spreading, by avoiding contact with others when they are sick.

Meanwhile, programs for new mothers and babies in Kugluktuk are now suspended.

"It makes sense if you have an infection that's spreading in the community and know the highest risk is among infants, bringing mothers and infants together as a group, to me, [does] more harm than good," Patterson said.

To limit the spread of RSV, Napayok has urged people back home in Kugluktuk not to gather for popular card games, to wash their hands and keep their homes clean.

"It's heartbreaking to see babies so sick," she said.