Human Rights, Biomedical Science, and Infectious Diseases Among South American Indigenous Groups

Abstract

Despite the efforts of international health agencies to reduce global health inequalities, indigenous populations around the world remain largely unaffected by such initiatives. This chapter reviews the biomedical literature indexed by the PubMed database published between 1963 and 2003 on South American indigenous populations, a total of 1864 studies that include 63,563 study participants. Some language family groupings are better represented than are others, and lowland groups are better represented than are highland groups. Very few studies focus on major health threats (e.g., tuberculosis, influenza), public health interventions, or mestizo-indigenous epidemiological comparisons. The prevalence rates of three frequently studied infections—parasitism, human T-cell lymphotropic viral infection (HTLV), and hepatitis—are extraordinarily high, but these facts have been overlooked by national and international health agencies. This review underscores the urgent need for interventions based on known disease prevalence rates to reduce the burden of infectious diseases in indigenous communities.

Influence of helminth infections on childhood nutritional status in lowland Bolivia

“…In both cases, the frequency of helminth infection is high but most individuals were infected with only one species. A high prevalence of intestinal parasites is consistent with what is found throughout indigenous populations in the rural tropics (Hurtado et al, 2005).…”

“…Hurtado et al (2001Hurtado et al ( , 2005 note that indigenous South American populations tend to be chronically infected with soil-transmitted helminth infections and simultaneously produce very high levels of immunoglobulin E. They argue that this may result in unique immunological and physiological vulnerabilities to disease stress. If this hypothesis is shown to be true, it will require a revision of our interpretations of normal and abnormal physiological functioning across diverse environmental conditions.…”

Nutrition transition in Amazonia: Obesity and socioeconomic change in the Suruí Indians from Brazil

“…In the Brazilian Amazonia, as well as in other countries of the region, these diseases are increasingly prevalent while under-nutrition in children and infectious and parasitic diseases still remain important causes of morbidity and mortality (Coimbra and Santos, 2004;Coimbra et al, 2002;Hurtado et al, 2005), which results in an increasingly complex epidemiological profile.…”

Towards Understanding the Health Vulnerability of Indigenous Peoples Living in Voluntary Isolation in the Amazon Rainforest: Experiences from the Kugapakori Nahua Reserve, Peru

“…Creating a situation where disease transmission may occur can therefore be seen as a violation of the rights to health and life for voluntary isolated peoples. Some authors have highlighted the responsibilities of national governments and international agencies to promote Indigenous health policies based on existing knowledge of disease susceptibility (Hurtado et al, 2001(Hurtado et al, , 2005. Similarly, lessons learned from the experiences reported here about the health consequences of social and economic policies should be applied in Peru and other parts of lowland South America where Indigenous peoples continue to reject relations with outsiders.…”

“…The resilience (Berkes, 2007) or capacity of voluntarily isolated peoples to adapt in some sense is considerable, as evidenced by their adaptation to life without relationships with outsiders over the last century, but this resilience is low in acute epidemics which so severely challenge their survival. An estimated 38% of the Indigenous peoples of Brazil disappeared between 1900 and 1957 largely as a result of introduced diseases (Ribeiro, 1967in Hurtado et al, 2005. Other approaches to vulnerability stress the role of contextual factors in constructing an individual's vulnerability, e.g., in relation to HIV/AIDS infection (Delor and Hubert, 2000).…”