THE Mariano Cyst, a remote community leader in his dense rainforest Amazon of Peru, first learned about the global pandemic Covid-19 this year October, when health workers arrived by boat in his isolated village with vaccines.
“We did not know about him COVID-19. “This is the first time we have heard about it,” he said Cyst through a translator from the village Flail, in the huge but sparsely populated area Loreto of Peru in the north of the country.
The «Reuters» arrived along with government health workers and members International Red Cross in the indigenous community Urarina of Cyst, after a three-day boat trip along the rivers, starting from the city Iquitos of Amazon, the largest metropolis in the world that is not accessible by road.
In the Flail, the village higher on the river, the inhabitants hunt and fish for food and live in wooden houses like stilts without electricity. Connection to the outside world is minimal and the local language has developed individually over the centuries.
“The Principles have not come here for many years. “These communities are really forgotten,” he said Gilberto Inuma, its president Fepiurcha, an organization that defends its rights Urarina.
The wider group of natives Urarina, one of its most insular Peru, has just 5,800 people, according to official figures. Not all communities have escaped the knowledge or impact of the pandemic. At least five of her people Urine have died from COVID-19, said ο Inouma.
Upward river travel highlights the challenges of vaccinating remote indigenous communities in the Peru and beyond, as well as gaps in wider access to health care for remote groups.
Many members of the community complained that what they really needed was better ongoing health care services.
In the village without doctors, diseases include headaches, diarrhea, malaria and conjunctivitis, he said. Cyst. “We do not know how to take care of our patients. That is our concern. “
Indigenous communities, especially in Amazon, have some of the lowest vaccination rates in Perusaid Julio Mendigure, head of group health policy at Ministry of Health of the country.
Less than 20% of them have been fully vaccinated, compared to about half for the country as a whole, he said.
“When you look at this number, you have to remember that in order to get both doses, the teams have to travel 4-5 hours. “This is at best,” he explained Beg. To get to Flail It took 26 hours of travel for three days along rivers that at times dry out or were blocked by fallen trees.
The boat contained a blue cooling box carrying 800 doses of Chinese vaccine Sinopharm, cooled with dry ice. A team will return in November to give the second installments.
“I decided to get the vaccine so I would not get sick,” one woman told Urine who was vaccinated and asked not to be named because the community speaks so rarely to strangers.
“Because it is possible, if traders come to visit the area, to bring the disease and transmit it,” he added.
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