Witzig plans to transport the computer equipment on a small boat amid drums of gasoline, provisions and medical supplies on a forty-eight hour river trek from Iquitos, in Peru’s north-eastern Loreto Province, to its eventual destination in the heart of the rain forest. There, Witzig hopes to continue his work among the Urarina, an indigenous group that has lived in the area for at least half a millennium.

Dr. Richard Witzig conducting a malaria survey of the Urarina, an indigenous group living for centuries in the Peruvian Amazons.

Dr. Witzig, or Ritchie as his English-speaking friends call him, is affectionately known by another name in the Chambira river basin where the Urarina live. "They call me Big White Monkey," he said before his trip, smiling.

Witzig has worked in the region since 1992, studying and treating increasingly drug-resistant strains of Malaria. There were 150,000 recorded cases of malaria in the Rhode Island-sized jungle province last year, many of them fatal. New strains of malaria are just one of several invaders threatening the survival of the Urarina, who traditionally have moved deeper into the jungle when danger has approached. Some of the people Witzig hopes to examine for the medical database live so deep in the jungle that he may be the first outsider they’ve ever seen. "These people are quite remarkable," Witzig said, "They are ecologically very flexible. They can live in the jungle or along rivers." That adaptive ability has served the Urarina well as oil companies and colonists have penetrated farther into the Amazon wilderness, bringing diseases such as cholera, whooping cough and drug-resistant malaria to this once isolated part of the world.

The growing health problems generated by encroaching outsiders prompted Witzig to work with the Peruvian government in an attempt to bring organized medical care to the region. "We’re running a completely functional health clinic on the river, but we want the government to put in a full blown health post," he said. To give the government the necessary information, though, Witzig must first catalog the inhabitants of the region and their health needs. "The census is key," Witzig explained, "Everything will be computerized and analyzed so we can show the Peruvian government what is needed."

Witzig hopes the census can help the Urarina with another life and death issue, this one a legal matter: retaining the rights to the land they live on, which is threatened by oil exploration and a PetroPeru pipeline. Retention of enough rain forest to hunt in is central to their survival. "If they don’t have access to their land," warns Witzig, "They’re going to die."

Dr. Witzig is a DGH Advisory Council member and the coordinator of the Amazonian Indigenous People’s Health Project. For more information, you can read an online article he wrote about his work among the Urarina: www.nativeweb.org/saiic/ayn/urarina.html.

In This Issue:
• DGH Profile: Dr. Lanny Smith
• DGH Supports the Mexico Solidarity Network
• A Day’s Life... Wendy Hobson
• Report from the Field: DGH in Chiapas
• DGH in the Peruvian Amazons
• Human Rights in the Arts
• Liberation Medicine: Health & Justice
• DGH Announcements