An epidemic, suspected to be malaria, has killed dozens of people of the Yanomami tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon. Leaders of the three villages told health workers that around 50 people have died so far, many of them children.
"There are still many, many sick people," Andres Blanco told the Associated Press (AP) over telephone from Puerto Ayacucho in southern Venezuela. Blanco, a Yanomami health worker in a government program for the indigenous communities, alerted regional officials this month after trekking for days to visit three remote villages.
The total population of the three villages is only around 200.
Initial accounts and tests have shown there was some type of epidemic and evidence of malaria. "The number could be lower, but in any case it's an alarming number," said Dr Carlos Botto, who leads a programme focused on river blindness at a government institute.
Indigenous rights activist Christina Haverkamp, a German who runs Yanomami-Hilfe and has worked among these people for two decades, said that the government response has been slow and inadequate, and that doctors need access to helicopters to reach people in other areas where similar situations have been reported. "It's a catastrophe and also a scandal that they still don't ... have it under control," she said.
While malaria is common in the region, such an outbreak is rare. Recent studies have shown that deforestation in the Amazon has increased the likelihood of contracting malaria, since loss of forests has created optimal conditions for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
According to Survival International, the Yanomami are the largest relatively isolated tribe in the Amazon rainforest , with a population of about 32,000 on the Venezuela-Brazil border. Due to their isolation they have very little resistance to introduced diseases.
In the 1980s and 1990s when goldminers invaded their land, one fifth of the Yanomami in Brazil died from diseases such as flu and malaria introduced by the miners. Their future was only secured after a major international campaign led by the Yanomami themselves, Survival International and the Pro Yanomami Commission.
