Pertusis perturbs Alaskan mining

Can mining exploration cause the flu?  Here is a posting from a rather trivial blog, but it nicely captures the perspectives of the folk who get to make the final decisions.  This is from Emily Locke who writes from Anchorage, Alaska:

Earlier this week I went to the bush on an outbreak investigation. Earlier in the week the clinician at the health clinic noticed a cluster of people visiting with a pretty bad upper respiratory illness of some sort. So, we went to take samples (just the nurses could do this) and to help investigate what was going on. I, and two public health nurses chartered a plain (sic) to the village of about 100 people to investigate actually what was going on. Now we believe it was probably just the flu, but some people were getting so sick that they were passing out from coughing so much (which could be pertusis). Since I couldn’t do any of the specimen collection I was in charge of keeping a line list of information about all the individuals who were sick, and then making an “epi curve” to track the spread of disease.

I don’t think I’m supposed to say which village it actually took place in–since it was so small, but what made this particular investigation so interesting is that it was located at the site where a big mining company is conducting environmental exploration to get permits to start mining. Some think that the tailings from the mine could harm the fishing industry, which is the big livelihood of the area. So, needless to say, there was a lot of politics going on. We had to sift through all of the information we gathered because there was a lot of conflicting info between the villagers and the outside mining people.She never does tell us what came out of the information sifting: just another “epi curve” or another bout of “pertusis?”  

Could this be Pebble Mine?  As well the coughing began before the tailings came, otherwise we would have had them blamed?