Environmental News Network
Academia is
still abuzz over a new book charging that a measles vaccine killed
hundreds of primitive Amazon Indians three decades ago. But the
Yanomami today have other problems, just as deadly.
Chronic malaria
and river blindness have decimated and debilitated the Yanomami,
endangering the future of the world's largest remaining Stone
Age tribe, Indian experts say.
"Malaria
has been catastrophic for the Indians," said French anthropologist
Bruce Albert, who has worked with the tribe for 20 years. "Most
of the older Yanomami died and left the young feeling aimless.
So many are sick that no one has energy for rituals. It has become
a bewildered civilization."
In "Darkness
in El Dorado," journalist Patrick Tierney charges that geneticist
James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon inoculated Yanomami
with a dangerous vaccine, triggering a 1968 measles outbreak that
killed hundreds.
Epidemiologists
have rebutted the book's main charges, saying the vaccine distributed
by the University of Michigan researchers cannot transmit measles.
Still, the controversy has sparked debate about research ethics
and refocused international media attention on the Yanomami.
For the Yanomami,
the 1968 measles outbreak is a mere footnote in the larger story
of the tribes' ongoing struggle to cope with the disease and destruction
as civilization encroaches ever more rapidly on their Portugal-sized
reservation straddling the border of Brazil and Venezuela.
"We've
always had jungle sicknesses that our shamans could cure,"
Yanomami chief Davi Kopenawa, 46, said by telephone from Boa Vista,
some 2,100 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro. "But our shamans
were helpless against civilization's diseases. Many of my relatives
died soon after white men came."
Over the past
20 years, malaria and other diseases that arrived with prospectors
and other invaders have killed at least 3,000 Indians on the reservation's
Brazilian side.
About a quarter
of the nearly 13,000 Indians who live in Brazil came down with
malaria last year alone, according to the National Health Foundation.
Aggravating
matters, about a third of all Yanomami suffer from river blindness,
a disease transmitted by black flies that causes sight-impairing
lesions on the eyes. Other symptoms include alligator-skin, boils
and savage itching.
Though not fatal, the disease often leads to permanent blindness,
leaving victims unable to hunt or farm.
Health workers
on the Brazilian side say the situation is even worse in neighboring
Venezuela.
"We constantly
receive Yanomamis from Venezuela who come to tell us that their
relatives are dying," said Dr. Claudio Esteves, coordinator
of Urihi, a private group contracted by the government to provide
medical services. "Entire communities travel by foot from
long distances to receive attention at our medical posts. Venezuela
does nothing for them."
Brazil does
only a little bit more.
Thirteen guard
posts set up after the reservation was created in 1992 were dismantled
in 1995 because of scarce funds.
"There
are no patrols, and virtually no government presence on the reservation,"
complains Fernando Bittencourt of the NGO Pro-Yanomami Commission.
The Brazilian Non-Governmental Organization, or advocacy group,
works closely with the Yanomami.
Because of
this, many Yanomami are becoming increasingly dependent on the
lawless gold miners' camps for handouts and low-wage work. Earlier
this year, there were some 4,000 miners illegally camped in different
parts of the reservation.
Besides spreading
disease, the miners distribute guns and machetes to incite feuding,
said Federal Indian Bureau President Glenio Alvarez. Murder is
the third leading cause of death among the Yanomami after malaria
and respiratory infections.
The government
conducts periodic sweeps to root out prospectors and while they
have had some success, the operations have limited funding and
when the money runs out the miners drift back.
On the positive
side, the government spent some $6.3 million last year contracting
four NGOs to provide health care on the reservation.
The program
funds 243 health workers, including 13 doctors and 24 nurses,
who work full-time with the Yanomami. The workers must sometimes
hike for days into jungle highlands to reach the most isolated
of Brazil's 188 Yanomami villages.
Urihi, the
largest NGO handling 144 villages, has cut mortality rates in
half with monthly visits, according to Esteves.
Still, pioneering
Indian defender Orlando Villas-Boas worries that the privatization
of health care for the Yanomami could lead to a nightmare scenario
similar to the one recounted in Tierney's "Darkness in El
Dorado."
"The
Indians will always have unpredictable reactions to our medicine,"
Villas-Boas said. "It has to be introduced with great care.
I fear something terrible could happen with all these unmonitored
groups sharing responsibility for the Yanomamis. The government
has to be more directly involved."
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