The Ministry of Health has upped its health surveillance in Region One following the deaths of a number of Venezuelan Amerindians from an unknown disease in a province close to Guyana.
Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy told Stabroek News recently that the ministry was aware of the issue and had been monitoring the situation for one month now. He said about 38 Warau Indians in the province had died from suspected rabies, but it did not border Guyana. “The surveillance team in Region One has increased.
“Our team has been in an out and we have been doing so for about a month. So far there has been nothing to indicate that anyone from the Guyana side has been affected,” the minister said.
The disease was prevalent in the swampy Delta Amacuro, a state that is inhabited largely by Warau Indians, a nomadic indigenous group said to number more than 20,000. Reports are that of the 38 people who died, 16 died since the start of June. Meanwhile, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have said preliminary studies indicated that the latest outbreak may be a type of infectious rabies transmitted through bites from bats.
The symptoms which last three to six weeks, include partial paralysis, convulsions and an extreme fear of water. Also, persons become rigid just before they succumb. The disease is believed to be fatal in most cases. The researchers also noted that recently many animals in the area had died though they said no correlation had been established between those deaths and the disease.
According to a report in the New York Times Warau leaders accompanied by the researchers, took photographs and written testimonies documenting the disease to the health ministry in Venezuela earlier this month in order to set up a meeting with government epidemiologists but they were kept waiting for several hours. “We travelled by bus 16 hours to Caracas to make the authorities aware of the situation with the hope of getting some response,” said Norvelis Gómez, a Warau paramedic who was one of four community leaders in the group, told the paper. He said too that they were “met with disrespect on every level, as if the deaths of indigenous people are not even worth noting.”
