Key Considerations: Indigenous Peoples in COVID-19 Response and Recovery (original) (raw)
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The challenges facing indigenous communities in Latin America as they confront the COVID-19 pandemic
International Journal for Equity in Health
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-2019) pandemic struck Latin America in late February and is now beginning to spread across the rural indigenous communities in the region, home to 42 million people. Eighty percent of this highly marginalized population is concentrated in Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. Health care services for these ethnic groups face distinct challenges in view of their high levels of marginalization and cultural differences from the majority. Drawing on 30 years of work on the responses of health systems in the indigenous communities of Latin America, our group of researchers believes that countries in the region must be prepared to combat the epidemic in indigenous settings marked by deprivation and social disparity. We discuss four main challenges that need to be addressed by governments to guarantee the health and lives of those at the bottom of the social structure: the indigenous peoples in the region. More than an analysis, our work provides a practi...
The Lancet, 2020
Indigenous communities worldwide share common features that make them especially vulnerable to the complications of and mortality from COVID-19. They also possess resilient attributes that can be leveraged to promote prevention efforts. How can indigenous communities best mitigate potential devastating effects of COVID-19? In Bolivia, where nearly half of all citizens claim indigenous origins, no specific guidelines have been outlined for indigenous communities inhabiting native communal territories. In this Public Health article, we describe collaborative efforts, as anthropologists, physicians, tribal leaders, and local officials, to develop and implement a multiphase COVID-19 prevention and containment plan focused on voluntary collective isolation and contact-tracing among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists in the Bolivian Amazon. Phase 1 involves education, outreach, and preparation, and phase 2 focuses on containment, patient management, and quarantine. Features of this plan might be exported and adapted to local circumstances elsewhere to prevent widespread mortality in indigenous communities.
Frontiers in Tropical Medicine, 2023
Introduction: Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin, in Peru and elsewhere, suffered disproportionately from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In part, this was due to an initial lack of support by the Ministry of Health, who did not prioritize their care despite their vulnerable situation. Consequently, during the first wave of the pandemic, health professionals in public health facilities in Amazonian Indigenous communities had to handle the disease with limited information and resources. This article analyzes the actions carried out by Indigenous nurse technicians during the first wave of the pandemic. Methods: Recurrent semi-structured interviews with six Indigenous nurse technicians focusing on their measures toward disease prevention and caring during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Atalaya province, Ucayali region, in the Peruvian Amazon. Results: Nurse technicians worked closely with local authorities and volunteer health promotors. The limited resources they had at the health facilities, coupled with no training about how to treat COVID-19 symptoms led them to resort to their knowledge of traditional Indigenous medicine in combination with biomedical approaches, and support from Indigenous healers. Our analyses shows that this approach proved essential to alleviate symptoms and prevent complications and new infections. Conclusions: The actions implemented by the Indigenous nurse technicians strongly contributed to the management of COVID-19 in their Indigenous communities, being both effective and culturally appropriate. Our data is in support of a health provision concept that bridges medical knowledge systems in contexts of diversity, avoiding a view on Indigenous health practices as antagonistic or in competition with biomedical practices provided by public health services.
COVID-19 threatens indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon
2020
The advance of COVID-19, which has already claimed more than 40 thousand Brazilian lives, has hit the indigenous populations of the Amazon head-on. According to the Special Health Department for Indigenous Peoples (SESAI), of Brazil’s Ministry of Health, a total of 2,219 indigenous people were infected with the new coronavirus, with 86 recorded deaths as of June 14, 2020. These figures are also clearly underreported, given that the official count does not consider indigenous victims living in the cities or those who do not receive healthcare and die in the villages.
Anthropology in Action
Around the world, Indigenous groups have been among the communities most severely affected by COVID-19, and the ability of health systems and social policy responses to support Indigenous responses to the pandemic has been affected by challenges of intercultural communication, sometimes compounded by racist and exclusionary social and political attitudes. The Brazilian Amazon has been a particularly extreme case. This article reflects on the experience of a group of Indigenous leaders and non-Indigenous anthropologists working to promote intercultural approaches to epidemic response in the Rio Negro region of Northwestern Amazonia. It brings together findings from in-person fieldwork on Indigenous responses to infectious disease outbreaks that affected the region before the COVID-19 pandemic and from remote research on COVID-19 response conducted in 2020 and 2021.
Perspective Piece COVID-19 and Brazilian Indigenous Populations
The newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of COVID-19, including severe respiratory symptoms with an important lethality rate and high dissemination capacity. Considering the indigenous people of Brazil, it is feared that COVID-19 will spread to these communities, causing another stage of decimation. Despite advances in indigenous health care in the country, there are still many challenges due to the social vulnerability of this population, whose lands continue to be illegally exploited. Based on these considerations, this article discusses challenges in caring for the indigenous population in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil.
2021
Recommended Citation Montag, Doreen, Marco Barboza, Lizardo Cauper, Ivan Brehaut, Isaac Alva, Aoife Bennett, José SanchezChoy, Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti, Pilar Valenzuela, José Manuyama, Italo Garcia Murayari, Miguel Guimaraes Vásquez, Celso Aguirre Panduro, Angela Giattino, Edwin Julio Palomino Cadenas, Rodrigo Lazo, Carlos A. Delgado, Alfonso Nino, Elaine C. Flores, Maria Amalia Pesantes, Juan Pablo Murillo, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Sergio Recuenco, Robert Chuquimbalqui, and Carol Zavaleta-Cortijo. "Healthcare of Indigenous Amazonian Peoples in Response to COVID-19: Marginality, Discrimination and Revaluation of Ancestral Knowledge in Ucayali, Peru." BMJ Global Health 6 (2021): e004479. https://gh.bmj.com/ content/6/1/e004479
ANALYSIS OF THE APPLICATION OF PUBLIC HEALTH POLICIES FOR THE INDIGENOUS POPULATION DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN THE STATE OF AMAZONAS (Atena Editora), 2022
Amazonas concentrates a significant part of the Brazilian indigenous population. The loss of traditional ways of life as a result of violations and disrespect of environmental laws, attacks on the environment, occupation of indigenous lands, social exclusion and ethnic discrimination resulting from the colonization process caused greater vulnerability in relation to health and resulted in a mortality rate higher than the white population, even living in the same regions. This study aims to analyze how public health policies were applied to the indigenous population in Amazonas during the Coronavirus pandemic. Commenting on public health policies aimed at the indigenous population at the federal, state and municipal levels and comparing how these policies were applied during the COVID-19 pandemic allowed for a descriptive and qualitative analysis of a content analysis. It is noteworthy that the case study was restricted to the Amazon.