Health

Swine flu endangers Amazonian tribe

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Swine flu has hit one of the largest isolated indigenous groups in the Amazon. The government in Venezuela has sealed off part of the country to stop swine flu devastating the Yanomami tribe of Indians. Seven members of the tribe have been killed and a thousand are believed to have caught the flu. Survival International is London-based indigenous rights group. We speak with Fiona Watson, research and field director for Survival International, about the situation.

• BBC coverage
• Survival International – The movement for tribal peoples

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MARCO WERMAN:  Just to give you an idea of how far swine flu has spread, it has now reached an indigenous group deep in the Amazon.  The government of Venezuela has sealed off part of the rainforest to prevent the flu from decimating the Yanomami Indians.  A thousand members of the tribe are believed to have caught the flu, seven have died.  Survival International is a London based indigenous rights group.  Fiona Watson is research and field director.  Fiona, how is it that this isolated group was exposed to swine flu?

FIONA WATSON:  Well, we think it came in through a place called Novaka which is the place in the Yanomami territory in Venezuela which has the most contact with national society.  There’s an air strip there, there’s a Catholic mission station so people who are working with the Yanomami or visiting for whatever reason, it could be doctors, government officials, people working on health and education programs, come in and out so I think it has come in that way.

WERMAN:  And remind us who the Yanomami are.

WATSON:  They are one of the largest relatively isolated indigenous peoples living in the Amazon rainforest.  There’s about thirty two thousand in Brazil and Venezuela.  They’ve lived there for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  They live by hunting and gathering and it very much a people who are living in the forest, completely self-sufficient and came into contact with outsiders really in any great way from the fifties onwards and the Yanomami have very little immunity; many Amazonian tribes, remote tribes have very little immunity to common diseases you know, which for us don’t present too much of a problem like the common cold or flu.  They haven’t had this immunity because they’ve been so isolated.

WERMAN:  As you say the Yanomami have suffered from other epidemics that were introduced from outside their community.  How have previous epidemics come into their community and what were the consequences?

WATSON:  Well the epidemics almost invariably come in through outsiders.  I mean in the fifties when you had the border commission authorities from Brazil went up to the border area to survey the border and then missionaries came in shortly after that, there were devastating epidemics of particularly measles and then I think possibly the most devastating, certainly in terms of numbers who died were the invasions in the 1980’s where you had forty thousand gold miners invaded the Yanomami territory in Brazil and twenty percent of the Yanomami died and that was through these diseases like malaria, like measles, like flu to which they had no resistance.

WERMAN:  Can you tell us specifically what Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan government are doing right now?  I mean they’ve been quite outspoken on indigenous rights.

WATSON:  It seems to me they have acted fairly quickly.  They’ve got the doctors in there trying to contain the epidemic but I think this raises a wider question and it’s a question really for both the Brazilian and the Venezuelan governments is that there has not been, in my view, sufficient attention given to permanent healthcare in the region so that they are in place when these epidemics do happen.

WERMAN:  Isn’t there a risk though of bringing in more outsiders and creating more transmission of disease?

WATSON:  That’s always a risk but I think if you’ve got a few dedicated teams of people who speak the language, who know the Yanomami well, who are trusted by them and who, themselves are screened before they go in, I don’t think that poses a problem.

WERMAN:  Fiona, your group, Survival International, has been typically fighting for indigenous land rights.  I’m wondering, is disease a game changer now for you?  I mean these indigenous people now have a really dire fight for survival, literally, on their hands.

WATSON:  Yes, I mean, certainly the question of disease is a huge challenge and a problem and survival is working particularly on contacted Indians.  This is tribes mainly in the Amazon region, but also in the Chako Forest of Paraguay and the Andamin Islands of India where you have isolated, if not uncontacted tribes and these people have absolutely no immunity at all, even less than the Yanomami because they have been isolated for hundreds of years and this is a very, potentially very serious problem and in areas like Brazil, in parts of the western Amazon where you’ve had massive penetration of colonists, of loggers, of miners, this is becoming an increasing threat to these very small, fragile groups where you may only have, I mean I know of cases where you might only have five survivors or twenty survivors of a tribe who are literally on the run, fleeing these invaders and if there is any casual contact, then they will be exposed to diseases and we simply won’t know.  It’ll be you know, like a hidden genocide.

WERMAN:  Fiona Watson, research and field director for Survival International, speaking with us from London.  Thank you very much, indeed.

WATSON:  Thank you.

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