Yanomami Research Paper

The Yanomami are a tribe of indigenous people that live in parts of the rain forest, more specifically northern Brazil, and southern Venezuela. They depend on the slash and burn horticultural method of farming. Although they are about 27,000 of them they live in about 300 scattered compounds with tribes of about 40 to 500(Mann). Depending on the dialect being spoken they can also be called Yanomamo, Yanomamї or Yanomamö, . The Yanomami people have recently come into the mainstream because they 've been fighting for their indigenous rights. Since they were first colonized in the 1960s they had been abused by not only by their government, miners but even anthropologists that have lived among them. I think that that 's extremely wrong and here are only some examples of how the Yanomami people have

Knowing that the Yanomami didn 't have any antibodies since they had not been victims of a massive epidemic, Chagnon and Neil decided to give the Yanomami people vaccinations for the measles. They knew that the kind of vaccination they were using could be bad for the indigenous people but they used it anyways. The particular kind they used was called Edmonton B. which was known to be bad for immune depressed people such as the Yanomami(Mann). It was also known to cause extreme symptoms for people with anemia, chronic exposure to malaria and dysentery, all three of which are things that the Yanomami suffered from. The symptoms were especially bad because the vaccination they used was made to be used with a dose of gamma globulin which is basically extra antibodies that would make their symptoms more mild however Chagnon and Neil did not administer the gamma globulin. Three months after they were vaccinated there was a massive epidemic. Some believe that the vaccinations they were given exacerbated the outbreak. Thousands of people died and although experts cannot be certain it 's been said that 15% to 20% of the people who contracted the disease died(cultural