The Amazon Medical Project

July, 2010

Peter Jenson had requested that his ashes be scattered from the highest platform on the Canopy Walkway, and Pam felt that the 4th of July would be an appropriate time to do that. I went with Pam, a boatload of people, and a huge cake decorated with white frosting and lusciously fragrant strawberries (Peter’s perennial favorite birthday cake, says Pam) in a fast boat to Napo Camp on Saturday afternoon. It has been a couple of years since I was there, and I was impressed by how little rainforest is left. All along the Napo River, except for one stand of skinny newborn ceiba trees (these are the rainforest giants that reach far above the tops of the all the other trees), there is pretty much nothing save cecropia trees, which are hardly more than weeds and reach no more than twenty or thirty feet in height. It occurred to me that the people living in all those villages along the river, who are considered by their cousins in Iquitos to be virtually uncontacted jungle primitives, actually do not know the rainforest at all. The game their ancestors hunted is gone, the trees their ancestors ate from and built with are gone, most of the medicinal plants are probably unknown and anyway have been replaced with fields of yuca and bananas.
Not until we reached the periphery of Explorama’s property did we see anything that remotely resembled rainforest. Then, all of a sudden, there were vines dipping their leaves down toward the water, and glimpses of large trees in the depths of the forest, and shady recesses visible from the river. It made me realize the enormity of what Peter managed to accomplish. Without his efforts, this too would all have been cut. Instead, more than 10,000 acres of rainforest habitat is still intact.

            In mid-July we had Vaccine Day, and I expected a poor turnout, since we were in the midst of the coldest frio we have had since the really bad one 17 or 18 years ago. We have periodic visits from the Antarctic jet stream, and this was a fierce one. I have a digital thermometer in my room, and it went as low as 62 degrees Fahrenheit (about 17 degrees Celsius) at 7:00 in the morning, and probably several degrees cooler in the pre-dawn hours.   (I am usually up around 6:00, but with the chill in the air, I huddled under the covers longer than I normally do.) In Wisconsin, this would be pleasant fall weather, but here, with no sweaters, few blankets, no glass windows, and no indoor heat, it is downright cold. We often have one or a few of these cool spells in the months from May to August, but it has been many years since we had one this chilly, and I do not recall any that lasted as long. It took nearly a week before it got warm enough for me to put away the socks, take off the long-sleeved shirt, fold the blanket, and actually take a shower.
            I have never understood how this frigid air makes it nearly to the Equator, since the Arctic jet streams that cool the northern U.S. in the winter do not reach as far as Florida, let alone South America. I do not see how the South Pole manages to push its cold breath into the tropics, but a visiting birdwatcher finally explained the phenomenon to me. The reason, apparently, is that South America is a very narrow continent, compared to North America, and it is bordered by two very large and cold oceans. There is thus nothing much to impede the passage of these cold winds, which sounds like a theory that makes sense.
By the time Vaccine Day rolled around, the cold front had been hanging around for at least three days, maybe four, with no signs of being ready to depart just yet.
            Despite the chill, we had a total of 40 patients, 35 of whom got vaccinated. Not bad.

August 2010

At this time ofyear, we always see people with diarrhea. This year, we have had a regular run (no pun intended) of cases of diarrhea. As the water level recedes, the water that remains is stagnant and stale. Some of the villages near the mouth of the Napo are located such that at low water times, the women must walk a mile or two to reach water for washing and drinking. The result is that people drink water that you or I would not dream of putting into our mouths, and as one might expect, the rate of diarrheal illnesses soars. In just the first five days of the month, we saw a total of nine cases of diarrhea, in patients ranging from 5 months to 70 years of age. Some of these patients arrive significantly dehydrated, and need intravenous fluids as well as oral replacement.

Earlier this year I crowed about the success of the water treatment tanks set up by various groups in many of the villages around here. Unfortunately, it looks like there is some teaching to be done. One of the local guys commented that a friend who had visited one of the houses in the village had drunk some of the treated water and got sick anyway. When he returned later to the house where he had imbibed, he noticed that although the water may have been clean when it went into the bucket, the water container was green and slimy inside. Clean water into a dirty container won’t cut it, so people are going to need to be educated to clean their containers periodically. (Actually, the owner of that house and that slimy bucket soon showed up with diarrhea, himself.)