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Amazon: Spread to the Indigenous |
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Tabitha111
Adviser Group Joined: January 11 2020 Location: Virginia Status: Offline Points: 11640 |
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Posted: July 26 2020 at 9:58am |
(I found this news article super interesting. Always good to learn new things, the interactive site is worth visiting as it is done so well~~Tabitha) Date: Sat 25 Jul 2020 Source: NY Times [abridged, edited] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/25/world/americas/coronavirus-brazil-amazon.html The Amazon River is South America's essential life source, a glittering superhighway that cuts through the continent. It is the central artery in a vast network of tributaries that sustains some 30 million people across 8 countries, moving supplies, people and industry deep into forested regions often untouched by road. But once again, in a painful echo of history, it is also bringing disease. The virus swept through the region like past plagues that have traveled the river with colonizers and corporations. It spread with the dugout canoes carrying families from town to town, the fishing dinghies with rattling engines, the ferries moving goods for hundreds of miles, packed with passengers sleeping in hammocks, side by side, for days at a time. As the pandemic assails Brazil, overwhelming it with more than 2 million infections and more than 84 000 deaths -- 2nd only to the United States -- the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region and the people who have depended on its abundance for generations. In Brazil, the 6 cities with the highest coronavirus exposure are all on the Amazon River, according to an expansive new study from Brazilian researchers that measured antibodies in the population. The epidemic has spread so quickly and thoroughly along the river that in remote fishing and farming communities like Tefe, people have been as likely to get the virus as in New York City, home to one of the world's worst outbreaks. In the past 4 months, as the epidemic traveled from the biggest city in the Brazilian Amazon, Manaus, with its high-rises and factories, to tiny, seemingly isolated villages deep in the interior, the fragile health care system has buckled under the onslaught. Cities and towns along the river have some of the highest deaths per capita in the country, often several times the national average. In Manaus, there were periods when every Covid ward was full and 100 people were dying a day, pushing the city to cut new burial grounds out of thick forest. Grave diggers lay rows of coffins in long trenches carved in the freshly turned earth. The virus is exacting an especially high toll on Indigenous people, a parallel to the past. Since the 1500s, waves of explorers have traveled the river, seeking gold, land and converts, and later, rubber, a resource that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, changing the world. But with them, these outsiders brought violence and diseases like smallpox and measles, killing millions and wiping out entire communities. Indigenous people have been roughly 6 times as likely to be infected with the coronavirus as white people, according to the Brazilian study, and are dying in far-flung river villages untouched by electricity. The crisis in the Brazilian Amazon began in Manaus, a city of 2.2 million that has risen out of the forest in a jarring eruption of concrete and glass, tapering at its edges to clusters of wooden homes perched on stilts, high above the water. Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, is now an industrial powerhouse, a major producer of motorcycles, with many foreign businesses. It is intimately connected to the rest of the world -- its international airport sees about 250 000 passengers a month -- and, through the river, to much of the Amazon region. Manaus's 1st documented case, confirmed on 13 Mar 2020, came from England. The patient had mild symptoms and quarantined at home, in a wealthier part of town, according to city health officials. Soon, though, the virus seemed to be everywhere. "We didn't have any more beds, or even armchairs," Dr. Alvaro Queiroz, 26, said of the days when his public hospital in Manaus was completely full. "People never stopped coming." In Manacapuru, more than an hour from the capital, Messias Nascimento Farias, 40, carried his ailing wife to their car and sped down one of the region's few country roads to meet the ambulance that could carry her to a hospital. But for most people living along the river, hundreds of boat miles from Manaus, the fastest way to a major hospital is by plane. Even before the virus arrived, people in far-flung communities with a life-threatening emergency could make a frantic call for an airplane ambulance that would take them to a hospital in the capital. But the small planes turned out to be dangerous for people with Covid-19, sometimes causing blood oxygen levels to plummet as the aircraft rose. Very few of the airlift patients seemed to be surviving, doctors said. When the coronavirus arrived in the Americas, there was widespread fear that it would take a devastating toll on Indigenous communities across the region. In many places along the Amazon River, those fears appear to be coming true. At least 570 Indigenous people in Brazil have died of the disease since March 2020, according to an association that represents the country's Indigenous people. The vast majority of those deaths were in places connected to the river. More than 18 000 Indigenous people have been infected. Community leaders have reported entire villages confined to their hammocks, struggling to rise even to feed their children. In many instances, the very health workers sent to help them have inadvertently spread the virus. The pandemic has been brutal on medical workers around the world, and it has been particularly difficult for the doctors and nurses navigating the vast distances, frequent communication cuts, and deep supply scarcity along the Amazon. Without proper training or equipment, many nurses and doctors along the river have died. Others have infected their families. [Byline: Julie Turkewitz and Manuela Andreoni] -- [Travel along the waterways is a known route for transporting emerging, re-emerging, and exotic pathogens to populations that are traditionally isolated from the more developed regions, and the spread of COVID-19 along the Amazon river is a clear example of this. Take note that spread through this route may already be underway in Africa, as major rivers such as the Nile traverse many countries in that continent. ] ****** |
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Dutch Josh
Adviser Group Joined: May 01 2013 Location: Arnhem-Netherla Status: Offline Points: 95607 |
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DJ-The nytimes is good in making "nice stories"-so now the one protecting the "indians" are spreading the disease ? No word on illegal trade of timber ? Forests turning into agriculture land (by small farmers-and than the "land owners" show up for the money or the land). Of course in a lot of poor countries rivers are the main way for transport-from goods to virusses. And has been so for a long time-that is why "Indians" moved away from the main waterways. To proof mal intent of course is different from expecting such. I believe in the 80's a travel agency offered the chance "to shoor at Indians". Street children in Rio were hunted by gangs hired from "bussinessector". The "Indians" are in the way for mining, agriculture-big money. Corona is "very welcomed" by this "rich elite". |
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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
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carbon20
Moderator Joined: April 08 2006 Location: West Australia Status: Offline Points: 65816 |
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No different than giving smallpox contaminated blankets to the Incas,and Mayans ......... we've come such along way in 400 years๐ |
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Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.๐
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Dutch Josh
Adviser Group Joined: May 01 2013 Location: Arnhem-Netherla Status: Offline Points: 95607 |
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[url]https://www.dw.com/en/25-years-after-the-candelaria-massacre-in-rio-de-janeiro/a-44779960[/url] Gives a description on how the poor are treated in Brazil. [url]https://www.dw.com/en/in-brazil-the-wounds-of-slavery-will-not-heal/a-43754519[/url] The former slaves did not have much progress after their slavery ended. [url]https://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/amazon_destruction.html[/url] forests have to make way for cattle raising; (you have to scroll down to get to the article) Since 1978 over 750,000 square kilometers (289,000 square miles) of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana. Why is Earth's largest rainforest being destroyed? For most of human history, deforestation in the Amazon was primarily the product of subsistence farmers who cut down trees to produce crops for their families and local consumption. But in the later part of the 20th century, that began to change, with an increasing proportion of deforestation driven by industrial activities and large-scale agriculture. By the 2000s more than three-quarters of forest clearing in the Amazon was for cattle-ranching. The result of this shift is forests in the Amazon were cleared faster than ever before in the late 1970s through the mid 2000s. Vast areas of rainforest were felled for cattle pasture and soy farms, drowned for dams, dug up for minerals, and bulldozed for towns and colonization projects. At the same time, the proliferation of roads opened previously inaccessible forests to settlement by poor farmers, illegal logging, and land speculators. But that trend began to reverse in Brazil in 2004. Since then, annual forest loss in the country that contains nearly two-thirds of the Amazon's forest cover has declined by roughly eighty percent. The drop has been fueled by a number of factors, including increased law enforcement, satellite monitoring, pressure from environmentalists, private and public sector initiatives, new protected areas, and macroeconomic trends. Nonetheless the trend in Brazil is not mirrored in other Amazon countries, some of which have experienced rising deforestation since 2000. However Brazil's success in curbing deforestation has stalled since 2012. And in July 2019, deforestation soared to levels not seen since the mid-2000s. [Amazon deforestation rises to 11 year high in Brazil (June 10, 2020)] |
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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
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