In Ecuadorian Amazonia, where I am based (and where I do research related to the environment and renewable natural resources), it seems like people in indigenous communities have managed very well through the covid-19 pandemic, in spite of very high rates of contagion. I know of two large communities, about 1400 and 2000 habitants, respectively, where most people took basically no precautions in order to avoid contagion, and now almost everybody have gone through the disease and then recovered. In the smaller community only one person died, an old male with previous medical conditions, and in the larger one nobody died. Nobody has even been taken to hospital. Among people from these communities who have migrated to urban areas, on the other hand, several people have died of covid (which seems to rule out genetic factors as an explanation). Obviously the age structure plays a role, as about half of the population is under 20 years old. But I suspect that the reason for the low mortality also is either related to general lifestyle things or to self-medication with medicinal plants. I would love to investigate this further, but I have no research funds, and I am not myself an expert in medical science.
It would be interesting to hear what researchers in the field have to say about this. Any suggestions on how I myself could proceed in order to investigate this issue would also be welcome.
Interesting observations!! Maybe really they used medicinal plants. I think you need to do a survey (questionnaire), collect information, then analyse what you had.
Thanks! Do you know if there are any useful standard questionaires available anywhere? Definitively they used medicinal plants, and a lot of different ones! So it will be quite a challenge to sort out which of them, if any, were actually useful...
I don't know if there are standard questionnaires, but you can find them in the literature, and you can do your own questionnaire according to your findings. I think indigenous communities don't use just one plant to treat something, but a formulation of many plants which have synergistic effect. You can find such formulation in Indian and Chinese traditional medicines.
Hi Anders, this is a very interesting question, but I guess that it does not apply to Brazilian Amazon. Recent analysis show that the death average within indigenous groups is 150% higher than the national average. In Brazil we are facing a tremendous catastroph with the coronavirus arrival in indigenous and local communities. But, I do agree that comprehensive researches are imperative to properly estimatebthe impact of covid-19 in indigenous groups.
Thanks, Joao, for your reply. What exactly do you mean with the "death average" which is so much higher in indigenous groups than the national average? Is it the #deaths/#infected, or #deaths/#totalpopulation? In the latter case, it would be fully compatible with the experiences I describe from Ecuador, because the rate of infection in these communities has been extremely high, probably close to 100%.
Hi Anders, sorry the lack of details. In this case the average estimates means the number of death per 100,000 people, which is higher within indigenous groups. Probably this fact results from the lack of basic health infrastructure in remote places.
But you are rigth, in this evaluation we need to take into account the rates of infected People, which is also higher in indigenous communities.
Thanks for your reply
Right now, more studies are needed to explain how different populations in specific cultures and environments have been affected by the covid 19. There might be aggravating factors in the environment and cultural practices. There can also be conditions providing mitigation and solution.
Low mortality of covid in Amazonian indigenous communities because to their life style culture environment, food, and mostly used medicinal plants to their daily life surrounded natural resources
HI all! I suspect that the daily consumption of guayusa (ILEX) has a positive effect preventing Covid as studies of green tea have shown. Also, people now have found which plant mixtures work the best and as soon as someone is ill they start getting the medicine and also doing vaporizations with herbs. It is interesting that traditional health systems are doing better with covid than modern medicine, at least in the case of Amazonian Ecuador. But we need more research and to see what happens with the new variants. Anders Siren maybe we need to do a part 2?
Michael's paper on this confirmed what all of us who work in the Ecuadorian Amazon suspected. The Amazonian groups in Ecuador took almost no precautions, COVID ripped through these communities but very few people got really sick and/or died. It's impossible to know why--it could be the natural medicine, it could be genetic (there was an article in The New York Times this week indicating that "super-tasters" i.e. people who have two copies of a particular gene that makes them very sensitive to bitterness, do not seem to get sick if they have two copies of this gene (which also has an effect on the immune system), if they have one copy they get COVID but they don't get really sick, if they do not have any copy of this gene they are more likely to get really sick and/or die), or it could be a number of other things like the bats. There is a lot of bat diversity in this part of the world, more than lower down in the Amazon and bats carry COVID. So it could be they have already been exposed to a COVID variant that gives them some protection. I don't think this is something linguists or anthropologists can answer, but it would be interesting if we could get some disease experts interested in looking into this. I am just musing here--maybe a linguist isn't the best person to address this.
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