|
Brazil's National Health Foundation (Funasa) presented a partial tally of the emergency actions taken in the southern part of Mato Grosso do Sul (MS) in the past two weeks to prevent deaths due to malnutrition among Guarani-Kaiowá Indian children in the region.
The specialists pointed out that the present state of malnutrition reflects the Indians' scarcity of land and the social problems caused by this "confinement."
In Dourados, which contains the most heavily populated Indian reservation in the region, around 11 thousand Indians occupy 3,500 hectares.
According to the Funasa, 2,131 children were examined in the villages of southern MS, where around 37 thousand Guarani-Kaiowás live.
The medical teams discovered 21 cases of severe malnutrition, 106 cases of moderate malnutrition, 328 cases of children in a situation of nutritional risk, and 38 cases of excess weight.
The condition of the remaining 1,638 children is considered to be adequate. This, however, is just a preliminary evaluation, based on the results of the relationship between indices of weight and height.
"The situation is under control. Funasa is doing its homework," declared the technical coordinator of the emergency program, Antônio Fernandes Costa.
Despite this assessment, Funasa warned that the malnutrition problem is critical. "It was evident to everyone that hunger exists in the country, and we all have the responsibility to fight it," affirmed the director of Funasa's Department of Indigenous Health, Alexandre Padilha, following the presentation of the tally sheet.
There are, at present, nearly 40 Guarani-Kaiowá Indian children hospitalized at a Center for Nutritional Recovery situated inside the territory of the local Indian Reservation in Dourados.
According to the Funasa, since the emergency measures to prevent more deaths due to malnutrition among indigenous children were initiated, the number of hospitalizations has fallen from 12/week in February to 4 in the first two weeks of March.
Last week, the National Health Foundation and the Dourados Municipal Administration inaugurated a Pediatrics ward in the city's University Hospital. There are six Intensive Care Units and 15 infirmary beds, and, according to the Funasa, the ward should become a reference in caring for the health of the region's Indian children.
Translation: David Silberstein
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.