TV researcher 'brought fatal flu to Amazon tribe'

[CatWoman]

Amazonian tribes have called for film and television crews to be banned from their territories after a British production company was accused of starting a flu epidemic that killed four members of a remote Indian people.

Indigenous communities blamed a researcher from Cicada Films, based in London, for infecting members of the isolated Matsigenka tribe while scouting for a reality television show called World’s Lost Tribes.

Four members of the Matsigenka are thought to have died, three of them children. The Native Federation of River Madre de Dios and Subsidiaries, which represents local tribes, called for film crews to be banned.

In a statement, Cicada said it “emphatically denied” that its staff had done anything wrong. “When we arrived we found local people already ill with symptoms and signs of respiratory disease,” a spokesman said. “The researcher and his guide did not visit the area where the deaths are said to have occurred and no deaths occurred amongst the individuals they met.”

Glenn Shephard, a US anthropologist who has studied the Matsigenka for 20 years, said: “I warned specifically that their visit to the isolated villages of the Cumerjali could pose a health risk to the people.”

The Matsigenka tribe, who traded with the Incas 500 years ago, are spread out across southeastern Peru.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3629105.ece

[Sanity Claws]

1. How very sad!

Exposing people to disease for the sack of a reality show? Have they no regard for the lives of people?

[Warpy]

2. Slanted reporting. It should have been called

a DOCUMENTARY film. The Beeb does this stuff all the time and so do indie documentary fimmakers.

Great care is taken by regional governments to make sure that any outsiders who contact these tribes are free of disease. The indigenous people are extremely vulnerable to illnesses Europeans have developed a partial immunity to.

This will go to court and the strains of flu will be compared. I sincerely hope some researcher didn't infect them. A researcher should certainly have known better than to have any contact at all with indigenous people with even a mild case of the sniffles.