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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

What happened in Canada? You see charts like this with sub-Saharan Africa and Mongolia are lit up and that's no surprise, but then Canada shows up and you wonder what happened. They scored worse than the US at a healthcare metric! They scored worse than Mexico.

Is this one of those things where the Indigenous population has a real problem that is skewing the numbers for the entire country or did the government not believe in the vaccine for some reason?

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I don't know _what_ is going on but I have a guess.

I live in Canada. We see these 'Hepatitis vaccine' posters at every doctors office/clinc. They are all related to "going on vacation somewhere warm".

So the implication is "Caribbean vacation = hepatitis".

There were even TV commercials that tried to show "unexpected places you could get hepatitis from", from the ice-cube, from the sand on the beach (showing a cut foot), from a nail salon, etc. Just to try and raise awareness.

Hepatitis rates among First Nations, Metis and Inuit are apparently significantly higher than hepatitis rates among other Canadians.

That does sound plausible.

Free health care? Sure! Drinkable water? Fuck no!

The only good thing you can say about Canadas treatment of it's First Nations is that we haven't recently given them small-pox filled blankets.*

*that has been caught on film and verified by 300 independent labs.

A not insignificant contributor to the higher levels of hepatitis is intravenous drug use. You could also depress yourself to no end if you reviewed the levels of suicide amongst indigenous Canadians. It's genuinely shocking.

https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/indigenous-suicide-preve...

We didn't give them any ever. And the only reservations that don't have drinkable water are doing it by choice. They get millions of dollars and band leaders choose to spend it on themselves instead of their communities. Stop acting like non-whites are all retarded children that white people must babysit and do everything for. The more you treat people that way, the more they act that way.

It's the same with the Australian Aborigines, but then virtually every other kind of disease is also much higher amongst that group - especially those living in remote communities. As the article says, Hep B is largely "a disease of the poor".

I don't follow. You're saying posters and TV commercials about hepatitis cause more hepatitis? (I bet you're not, but I really don't get it)

The suggestion seemed to be implying those that produce those commercials are telling people that vacation spots could be a common time + location to get the infection.

I still don't get it. Is that true or not?

Perhaps related, right now there is a 6 month waiting list for the Hep B vaccine here in Canada.

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