Five-year-old Brody Meekis died from strep throat. No, this is not a report from 50 years ago or from a third world country. This happened in Canada, May 2014. He lived in Sandy Lake First Nation, 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay. Gloria Galloway wrote in the Globe and Mail that his death “casts a critical light” on the inadequacies of health-care delivery on First Nations reserves. Sadly he wasn’t the only child to die from this treatable disease. Five months earlier a four year old from a different reserve had also died from strep.
Ms. Galloway wrote “Many things went wrong in the treatment of Brody Meekis, many of them related to a shortage of medical resources in the remote indigenous community where, as with other Canadian reserves, the responsibility for health care lies with the federal government.”
