After the Fires, Yanomani Indians Face Malaria
Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises
4/3/98
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: After the Fires, Yanomani Indians Face Malaria
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 4/3/98
Byline: William Schomberg
BRASILIA, April 3 (Reuters) - After the fires which threatened their huge
rainforest reservation in the northern Amazon, Brazil's primitive Yanomami
Indians are now at risk from rampant malaria, a Catholic missionary warned on
Friday.
``The number of cases is exploding,'' said Carlo Zacquini, a member of the
independent Commission for the Creation of the Yanomami Reservation (CCPY)
which runs three health posts deep in the rainforest.
He said 1,100 members of the distant Aoaris community who live in communal
huts in clearings near the Venezuelan border were particularly at risk.
About 800 Yanomamis there were sick with the falciparum strain of malaria
which, if untreated, quickly leads to coma and death. Of 172 Indians living in
Paapiu, another village, 117 were also sick with various types of malaria,
Zacquini said.
CCPY health workers were able to fly into the jungle in recent days after thick
smoke caused by huge savannah and forest fires grounded its planes for weeks.
The fires, the biggest on record in the Amazon, raged out of control for nearly
two months. Rain this week finally extinguished flames that had defied the
efforts of 1,700 firefighters.
``People died because we could not get into the area to remove the sickest
patients,'' Zacquini said.
The missionary said he knew of one fatal malaria case while government health
workers had told him of several others. Medicine was in short supply, he said.
An army spokesman said troops and firemen were still fighting fires in the
north of Roraima state, on the Venezuelan border. No rain fell in those areas
but the situation was under control.
While the fire damage in the Portugal-sized Yanomami reservation was
reported to be small, rivers had virtually dried up amid a drought which
lasted from September until this week, providing malaria-carrying mosquitoes
with ideal for breeding conditions in stagnant pools.
A member of a United Nations team currently assessing the fire damage in
Roraima said the international community would be asked to provide medicine to
help fight malaria.
The Yanomamis and the Wapixana, Macuxi and Taurepang tribes, who live in the
savannah areas devastated by the fires, also needed seeds and farm tools to
resume crop planting, Manuel Pinelo said by telephone from the Roraima state
capital Boa Vista.
``We're gathering information to try and work out the full extent of the
problem,'' Pinelo said.
He said most of the burning took place in Roraima's extensive savannah and
converted farmland, large areas of which burn each dry season.
But fire also pushed into the low transition forest on the edge of the
savannah and into lush rainforest which is normally too humid to burn.
``The Yanomamis were affected. The animals they hunt appear to have fled and
their fruit trees were burned,'' Pinelo said.
The Yanomamis were first discovered by Catholic missionaries in the 1920s but
lived in virtual isolation until the 1970s and 1980s when tens of thousands of
``garimpeiro'' wildcat miners poured into their lands to pan for gold.
With no immunity to even common colds, the Yanomamis were decimated. About
20,000 lived in Brazilian territory 20 years ago. Now there are just 9,000
although the population recently began to grow again, officials say.
Even now, only a handful of Yanomamis speak Portuguese. In many areas, warriors
still raid rival villages to steal women and babies are sometimes killed to
ensure the survival of others.
Anthropologists believe the tribe has lived for about 2,000 years in what is
now northern Brazil and southern Venezuela.