(Boa Vista) In a hospital in the Brazilian Amazon, Yanomami children recuperate. The high number of severe cases of undernutrition and malaria among young people prompted the new leftist government to declare a health emergency.
At the San Antonio de Boa Vista Children’s Hospital in Brazil’s northern state of Roraima, a group of half-naked children with very skinny arms and legs doze in blue hammocks.
Some were hospitalized for pneumonia, malaria, gastroenteritis or snake bites in this public hospital where 59 indigenous minors are treated.
Among them 45 are Yanomami, eight of whom have been placed in intensive care, the town hall of Boa Vista told AFP on Friday, which manages the hospital.
It is the only hospital that treats children up to 12 years old in the state of Roraima, at the northern tip of the Brazilian Amazon.
Some 30,400 indigenous people live in Yanomami lands, straddling the states of Roraima and Amazonas, but also in part of neighboring Venezuela.
“The vast majority (of children) arrive suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition, complicated by infections such as pneumonia, malaria or gastroenteritis”, explains to AFP-TV, the Dr Eugenio Patrico, pediatrician at San Antonio Hospital.
“Because of malnutrition, they have very little reserves to fight infections”, explains the doctor, “so the repercussions are greater and some have to go to intensive care”.
The majority of Aboriginal children who arrive here are under eight years old and half the normal weight for their age, sometimes less. “They arrive in a very fragile state, due to malnutrition associated with infections”.
To get there, many children have been airlifted from remote areas of the Amazon rainforest.
While San Antonio Hospital accepts the most serious cases, other young patients and adults are treated at Casai, a dispensary in Boa Vista.
A field hospital was set up on Friday by the army, which set up tents in the courtyard of the Casai, in order to deal with the health crisis.
“Inhuman scenes”
The Health Ministry announced last week that 99 children under the age of five died in the remote Yanomami territory in the middle of the rainforest in 2022. They succumbed to malnutrition, pneumonia or malaria in particular.
Brazilian police have opened a “genocide” investigation, targeting public officials and health sector officials in the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who left power in December.
The new president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, sworn in on 1er January, recently visited Boa Vista. “What I saw shook me,” he said, referring to “inhuman” scenes.
People in the Yanomami lands, which are supposed to be inviolable and where all mining is banned, are struggling to feed themselves due to the destruction of the rainforest where they normally find their livelihoods.
According to Yanomami chiefs, some 20,000 illegal gold diggers have invaded their territory, killing natives, sexually abusing women and teenage girls and contaminating their rivers with the mercury they use to separate gold from sediment.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court announced that it had identified indications of the publication of false information by the Bolsonaro government on the situation of the Yanomami.