Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

by Rose George

The river now is not the only thing dividing Saskatoon: health and poverty statistics do the same. The city has some of the highest rates of HIV and hepatitis C in Canada, as does the province. On some reserves where Saskatchewan’s First Nations people live, HIV rates are eleven times higher than in the rest of the country and equivalent to Nigeria’s.39 An assessment of Saskatoon’s health disparities found that residents from six low-income neighborhoods, all in the west of the city, are 3,360 percent more likely to have hepatitis C than higher-income Saskatoon residents. An infant born in these neighborhoods is 448 percent more likely to die in its first year of life. This mortality rate, wrote the authors of the report, a senior epidemiologist and the city’s chief medical officer, “is worse than [in] war torn nations like Bosnia.”