A family history of TB

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This article was published 02/11/2009 (5804 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

He became the iconic face of the H1N1 outbreak earlier this year, but today toddler Peter Flett is more concerned with exploring the living room than wearing a tiny flu mask.

It’s been several months since baby Peter was flown to Winnipeg with severe flu symptoms. His face became the symbol of the impact the H1N1 virus had on remote First Nations. Images of Peter were splashed across newspapers and television screens across the country the same day the World Health Organization took note of the severe illness H1N1 caused among aboriginal people in Manitoba.

Today, there are no signs of illness, or his notoriety, in Flett’s Garden Hill home. He’s made a full recovery and life is as normal as it gets in the small but tidy three-bedroom house he shares with 10 of his relatives.

The house sits at the bottom of a slight slope, next to a white van with smashed windows and a broken-down washing machine. Crushed cardboard boxes are strewn near the house’s mud-caked front steps, beside empty soda cans and bits of scattered trash. Plastic covers the windows.

Inside, a sign that reads "God bless our home" greets visitors.

Before H1N1 hit, it was TB.

Coun. Jack Harper, Flett’s grandfather, said his earliest memory is of being taken to hospital in Norway House to recover from the disease. Since then, TB has been intertwined with his family’s history. In 2006, Harper drove 13 hours, mostly on a winter road, to take his wife Nellie to hospital in Winnipeg where she was in isolation with infectious TB for three weeks. All his children tested positive for TB and had to take medication. His brother-in-law had TB, and his teenage niece had TB, too.

The cycle of infection for this family never stopped.

But Harper and others say the recent flu outbreak is a wake-up call to the fact that if things don’t change, the health and social ills festering in First Nations communities will continue to worsen. The ferocity with which H1N1 influenza affected aboriginal people was a symptom of all the same problems as TB — overcrowded houses, malnutrition, substance abuse.

"I have three families living in my house," Harper said. "What’s in the house right now? Is there disease between the walls?"