Mysterious new mushroom species glow like the Northern Lights in Meghalaya forests

A mushroom documentation project in the forests of Northeast India has revealed not only 600 varieties of fungi, but also led to a new discovery: a bioluminescent — or light emitting — variety of mushroom. The new species — named Roridomyces phyllostachydis — was first sighted on a wet August night near a stream in Meghalaya’s Mawlynnong in East Khasi Hills district and later at Krang Shuri in West Jaintia Hills district. It is now one among the 97 known species of bioluminescent fungi in the world.  

Michele P. Verderane

How the scientists found it

During the monsoon season, a team of scientists from India and China embarked on a fungal foray in Assam. Over the course of two weeks, they were amazed by the vast diversity of fungi in the region: hundreds of species of fungi were spotted, some of which were new to science. After hearing reports from locals of “electric mushrooms”, they headed to West Jaintia Hills District in Meghalaya. It was a drizzly night and a local person guided the team to a bamboo forest, which is part of a community forest, and asked them to switch off their torches. A minute later, the group was awestruck by what they saw: in the midst of the darkness an eerie green glow emerged from dead bamboo sticks that were smothered in tiny mushrooms. The fungus emits its own light—a phenomenon known as bioluminescence.

Natural torches for residents

Interestingly, local residents used the glowing bamboo sticks as natural torches to navigate the forest at night. Steve Axford, a fungal photographer who accompanied the team, set up a small studio and took photos.

Upon closer observation, the team noticed that only the stipes (stalks) of the mushroom lit up and they suspected it could be a new species, said Gautam Baruah, who leads the Rural Futures initiative at the Balipara Foundation in Assam and is a co-author of the report. A detailed examination in the laboratory had confirmed their suspicion: it was a new species from the genus Roridomyces—and the first fungus in this genus to be discovered from India.  

This mushroom was only found growing on dead bamboo (Phyllostachys mannii). Special elements could be present in the bamboo substrate that this fungus prefers, said Samantha Karunarathna, senior mycologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of the report She added that more research is needed to understand why they grow on this bamboo species. So far this mushroom is known from Krang Shuri, West Jayantia Hills District and Mawlynnong, East Khasi Hills District in Meghalaya.

Michele P. Verderane

Lights serve a purpose

Only a few species of glowing fungi have been reported from India. Two have been reported from the Western Ghats, one in the Eastern Ghats, and one in the state of Kerala, among others. Glowing fungi have also been spotted in the forests of Maharashtra and Goa (part of the Western Ghats) but they have not been scientifically reported. Karunarathna believes the actual number of bioluminescent fungi in India should be higher.

Michele P. Verderane

A 2015 study showed that bioluminescence in Neonothopanus gardneri, a large, bright mushroom that grows at the base of young palm trees in Brazilian coconut forests, is under the control of a circadian clock. The activity of the enzymes involved in producing light peaks at night and this regulation implies that the lights serve a purpose.

(Source: India Times)

Amazon deforestation could trigger new pandemics, experts warn amid fears over Brazilian land ownership law

‘We run the risk of a serious environmental reverse during this crisis’, former environment agency chief warns

The Brazilian government is seeking to use coronavirus as cover to usher in laws which could lead to increased occupation of indigenous lands and deforestation in the Amazon, campaigners and experts allege, amid warnings that further environmental disruption may lead to new pandemics.

The country has been divided on the severity of Covid-19, with president Jair Bolsonaro dismissing it as “a little flu” and opposing lockdown measures, for which public support is waning, despite mass graves being dug in Sao Paulo in the face of rising fatalities.

While the crisis has seen most industries grind to a standstill, government data suggests deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rose 30 per cent in March compared to the same period last year, with the most recent data suggesting the trend has continued in April.

There has also been a reported increase in forays into some indigenous lands by miners and land-grabbers, as both civil and official protection efforts are scaled back for fear of infection.

Against this backdrop, scientists are issuing renewed warnings that ecological disruption can increase the chance of novel infections crossing over to humans – known as “zoonotic” diseases.

“Approximately one in three outbreaks of new and emerging illnesses is linked to changes in land use, like deforestation,” Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, told Mongabay.

Dr Daszak was lead author in a vast US government-backed study published in 2019 which noted that HIV, Ebola and Zika virus are all “diseases causally linked to land change use”.

Some experts suggest the Amazon is a particularly high-risk location for novel outbreaks.

“Where you have a huge biodiverse zone, the Amazon, and then you have an encroaching human footprint, through urbanisation, road networks, deforestation, extractive industries like logging and mining, you have all of the ingredients for a virus spillover recipe,” David Wolking, of the University of California’s One Health Institute told Greenpeace’s investigative arm, Unearthed.

Wildfires, often caused by slash-and-burn deforestation tactics, can also play a role in the emergence of new diseases.

Notably, some researchers now credit the huge fires in Indonesia in 1998 with the arrival of Nipah virus – with vast smoke clouds forcing fruit bats to search elsewhere for food, settling on trees in Malaysian orchards. Pigs eating the same fruit soon fell ill, with farmers following suit shortly afterwards.

With the Amazon suffering its worst fire season in a decade in 2019, more than a dozen international experts convened to offer a stark warning.

“The Amazon region of Brazil, endemic for many communicable or zoonotic diseases can, after a wildfire, trigger a selection for survival, and with it change the habitat and behaviours of some animal species,” they wrote. ”These can be reservoirs of zoonotic bacteria, viruses, and parasites.”

Amid these warnings, Brazilian congress could soon hold a digital-only vote – using emergency processes introduced to allow more rapid decision-making during the Covid-19 crisis – on enshrining temporary legislation into permanent law, which campaigners warn would legitimise historic land-grabs and facilitate new invasions, paving the way for further deforestation.

As a result, the 120-day Provisional Measure (MP) 910, decreed by Mr Bolsonaro in December, may now be passed as a permanent measure within the next three weeks without being subjected to typical levels of debate and scrutiny, environmentalists allege.

The Bolsonaro administration has said the new land ownership rules will grant legal titles to farmers who have occupied federal lands in a “tame and peaceful way for many years”, enabling them to “rise above subsistence farming and improve their income”.

It insists the new law in “no way” facilitates land-grabbing or deforestation, arguing that new landowners will be held strictly accountable for the preservation of up to 80 per cent of their land.

But analysts warn that the new legislation allows huge swathes of land illegally cut down and occupied before 2018 – often by criminal gangs – to be legally seized by land-grabbers using evidence of their illegal activities as proof of their occupation.

Meanwhile, a new rule called IN 09, passed last week by the government’s indigenous agency Funai, strips yet-to-be-demarcated but indigenous lands of their designation as “indigenous” in the land registry, according to Greenpeace.

Roughly a third of all indigenous land is not yet demarcated, the group says. In 2019, the BBC reported that more than 800,000 indigenous people lived in 450 demarcated indigenous territories, which accounted for 12 per cent of the country’s total land area.

These new changes will allow people occupying indigenous land – usually for the purpose of deforestation and agriculture or mining – to obtain a certificate that the land is undemarcated.

Under the proposed new law, MP 910, this certificate could then be used in support of a land-grabber’s claim to legalise property on that land, and eventually purchase for a fraction of the value without bidding against other parties.

The former head of the country’s environment agency has also warned that sections of the proposed law which supposedly benefit small farmers – by scrapping the need for official inspections of land under 2,500 hectares ahead of a potential acquisition – could be exploited as loopholes by large-scale land-grabbers.

The government says it will stop proxy ownership by larger parties – who it is feared could use small landowners to acquire it for them without official assessment - by banning the sale of newly acquired land for the first 10 years.

“With this flexibility, and without separating big landowners from small ones, this law legalises those who live from land invasion, deforestation and the sale of public land,” Suely Araujo, former president of Ibama, told Mongabay.

She added: “If there isn’t a political decision to withdraw MP 910 from the measures to be voted through, we run the risk of a serious environmental reverse during this [health] crisis.”

The 2018 cut-off date would be the second extension of an initial 2004 cut-off, which campaigners fear would embolden land-grabbers with the promise of continually renewed amnesty for past crimes.

As a result, the new law could lead to the deforestation of an additional 1.6 million hectares – an area larger than Yemen – by 2027, conservation research organisation Imazon estimates.

“If passed, it would be a hard blow against any hope that there will be any regaining control and fighting deforestation,” Brenda Brito, a lawyer and researcher at Imazon, told Unearthed.

“It will, in fact, be the end of that hope, if anyone is still hopeful that the current government will actually face and fight deforestation. Because this measure will end up stimulating even more than is happening now.”

(Source: Independent)

Coronavirus 'could wipe out Brazil's indigenous people'

Indigenous communities in the Amazon region and elsewhere in Brazil are in danger of being "wiped out" by the coronavirus, according to health experts.

Respiratory illnesses - such as those that develop from the influenza virus - are already the main cause of death for native communities.

By Sunday 5 April, Brazil had reported more than 11,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 486 deaths.

Infections were initially concentrated in the industrialized state of São Paulo. However, they have now spread across the country, including to indigenous territories in the Amazon basin that are the size of France and Spain combined.

The first case among indigenous peoples was recorded in Amazonas state.

"There is an incredible risk of the virus spreading across the native communities and wiping them out," says Dr Sofia Mendonça, a researcher at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp).

Dr Mendonça is the co-ordinator of a university-led health project among indigenous peoples in the Xingu river basin in the Amazon rainforest.

She fears the coronavirus could have a similar impact to previous major outbreaks of highly contagious respiratory diseases such as measles.

In the 1960s, a measles outbreak among members of the Yanomami community living near the border with Venezuela killed 9% of those infected.

"Everyone gets sick, and you lose all the old people, their wisdom and social organization," Dr Mendonça says. "It's chaos."

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, she adds, some communities are planning to split into smaller groups and seek refuge inside the forest. That is how they avoided extinction during past epidemics.

Indigenous groups make up 0.5% of Brazil's population

"They will gather materials needed for hunting and fishing and will set up camps, waiting there until the dust settles," she says.

Many communities lack the means to reduce the risk of contagion, such as washing hands with soap and water, or using hand sanitizer.

People also often live in close quarters with each other and share bowls and glasses, both of which help infectious diseases spread more quickly.

They are now being advised to stop sharing utensils and to use traditional seclusion practices - such as those applied to women after they give birth - to isolate people with the symptoms of Covid-19.

Indigenous communities also live in areas where there is limited access to healthcare, particularly intensive care beds.

Some groups are planning to escape the pandemic by seeking refuge inside the forest

Taking measures into their own hands

But as the virus spreads across Brazil, many are questioning whether the government will seek to protect indigenous groups, which make up 0.5% of the population.

President Jair Bolsonaro is seen by many indigenous leaders as an enemy of their cause. He has said Brazil's indigenous lands are too big and that their natural resources should be shared with the rest of the population.

While many governors and mayors have ordered restrictions to reduce infections, the president has compared the coronavirus to a "a little flu" and advocated reopening schools and shopping centres.

In the face of government inaction, several indigenous organisations have asked their communities to suspend trips to cities and prevent visitors from entering their territory.

"Whoever is a true friend understands our fragility. Let's keep the coronavirus away from the villages," said a banner posted on a road in Mato Grosso state by members of the Karajá indigenous people.

A roadblock warning outsiders to stay away from indigenous villages. SANDRA HAKUWI KUADY

Even with such precautions, experts say it is likely Covid-19 will eventually reach some villages and that it will be necessary to isolate the sick before they infect people in contact with them.

Experts also warn about the grave threat the coronavirus poses to indigenous groups who already live in voluntary isolation.

According to the federal agency for indigenous affairs, Funai, there are 107 known indigenous groups in Brazil's Amazon that have no contact with the outside world.

However, illegal loggers, hunters and evangelical missionaries are operating in their territories. And indigenous organisations and NGOs say there has been a sharp increase in incursions in recent years.

Funai has also had its budget slashed by consecutive administrations, making it harder for the agency to protect remote communities.

There are now fears that the battle against the coronavirus will further reduce its resources to protect the forest and those living in it.

Indigenous groups say there has been an increase in incursions on their lands

While most indigenous groups agree they should avoid visiting cities to reduce the risk of infection, many leaders say people could go hungry if they have no access to markets.

In São Gabriel da Cachoeira, an Amazonian municipality that borders Colombia and Venezuela, thousands of members of local groups travel on boats to the city each month to receive pensions and access government cash-transfer programmes.

The expansion of such programmes in recent decades means some communities have stopped hunting for and growing their own food, and now rely on them to survive.

Marivelton Baré, president of the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of Rio Negro (Foirn), says many local communities are "in a panic".

"We'll need to take the food to the villages so that they don't expose themselves during this critical moment," he says.

There are no ventilators in São Gabriel da Cachoeira's hospital, so a seriously ill patient would need to be sent to the capital of Amazonas, Manaus - a 1,000km-long (620-mile) boat journey away.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a nurse working for the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health (Sesai) says its staff have no testing kits to detect Covid-19, and that there are not enough protective masks and other equipment to deal with cases in indigenous villages.

The Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health is monitoring the spread of Covid-19. AFP

Sesai itself told the BBC it had provided "a series of technical documents, so that indigenous peoples, managers and employees could be guided to adopt measures to prevent coronavirus infection".

The agency added that all its health teams had received training on how to treat patients.

But it did not comment on the fears of food shortages in villages.

Funai, the federal agency for indigenous affairs, did not say how it would tackle hunger and land invasions during the pandemic.

Mr Baré says the government has not offered any help and that people will start to ignore the advice to stay in their villages if their food stocks run out.

"If the choice is either being infected or going hungry, most will choose the first," he warns. "Then the consequences will be dire."

(Source: BBC)

Brazil confirms first indigenous case of coronavirus in Amazon

Positive test for 20-year-old woman from Kokama tribe comes amid fears virus could devastate remote communities

An indigenous woman in a village deep in the Amazon rainforest has contracted the novel coronavirus, the first case reported among Brazil’s more than 300 tribes, the Health Ministry’s indigenous health service Sesai has said.

The 20-year-old from the Kokama tribe tested positive for the virus in the district of Santo Antonio do Iá, near the border with Colombia, 880km (550 miles) up the Amazon river from the state capital Manaus, Sesai said in a statement on Wednesday.

The indigenous woman was a medical worker who had contact with an infected doctor in Brazil. Photograph: Florence Goisnard/AFP via Getty Images

Four cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the same district, including a doctor who tested positive last week, raising fears the epidemic could spread to remote and vulnerable indigenous communities with devastating effect.

Sesai said the woman was a medical worker who had been in contact with the doctor. She was the only person to test positive among 15 health workers and 12 patients tested after the doctor was found to have the virus, Sesai said. Their names were not made public.

The doctor had returned from vacation in southern Brazil to work with the Tikunas, one of the largest tribes in the Amazon with more than 30,000 people who live in the upper Amazon near the borders with Colombia and Peru.

The woman has not shown symptoms of Covid-19 and has been isolated with her family, Sesai said.

Health experts warn that the spreading virus could be lethal for Brazil’s 850,000 indigenous people, who have been decimated for centuries by diseases brought by Europeans, from smallpox and malaria to the flu.

They fear indigenous peoples’ way of life in communal hamlets under large thatched structures increases the risk of contagion if any single member contracts the virus.

(Source: The Guardian)

Brazil’s President is actively trying to destroy Amazon rain forest, leaked documents show

The documents show arguments put forward by Jair Bolsonaro that a strong government presence in the Amazon region is important to prevent any conservation projects going forward.

Intending to build bridges, motorways, and a hydroelectric plant in the rainforest, the Brazilian government hopes to ‘fight off international pressure’ to protect the Amazon, according to the leaked information.

As reported by The Independent, the plans were leaked to political website openDemocracy and include PowerPoint slides believed to have been presented at a meeting in February between Brazilian government officials and local leaders in Para state, which is home to the Amazonia National Park.

During the meeting, Brazilian ministers put forward projects planned for the region by President Bolsonaro’s government, with one slide mentioning a priority to strategically occupy the rainforest.

The slide reads, as per openDemocracy:

Development projects must be implemented on the Amazon basin to integrate it into the rest of the national territory in order to fight off international pressure for the implementation of the so-called ‘Triple A’ project.

To do this, it is necessary to build the Trombetas River hydroelectric plant, the Óbidos bridge over the Amazon River, and the implementation of the BR-163 highway to the border with Suriname.

The ‘Triple A’ (Andes, Amazon and Atlantic) project is a conservation effort led by the organisation Gaia Amazonas, which aims to conserve 265 million square kilometers of jungle and ‘the lungs of our world’.

But now Bolsonaro, Brazil’s controversial far-right president, appears to be sabotaging this effort as devastating fires rage through the Amazon. Fires which are causing a loss equivalent to three football fields per minute, according to the latest government data.

The rainforest – which covers northwestern Brazil and extends into Colombia, Peru and other South American countries – has been burning for weeks, plunging Brazil’s Sao Paulo into darkness and devastating the Amazon.

If the fire continues to burn at its current rate, this will be the first month for several years in which Brazil loses an area of forest bigger than Greater London, with many fearing it will never be able to recover.

According to the latest data from Brazilian satellites, as per The Guardian, 1,345 square kilometres of the region were cleared in July – a third higher than the previous monthly record under its current monitoring system, the Deter B satellite system, which started in 2015.

Bolsonaro yesterday (August 22) claimed his government ‘lacks the resources’ to extinguish the fire, although environmental groups are now placing the blame for the devastation directly on him.

Richard George, head of forests at Greenpeace, told The Independent:

The whole area around the Amazon has been highly volatile with loggers and farmers, and Bolsonaro has absolutely lit a torch under that.

The fire currently sweeping through the rainforest reportedly took hold after farmers announced a coordinated ‘day of fire’ on August 10, due to the president giving the go-ahead for farmers and illegal loggers to enter indigenous communities.

The Amazon rainforest provides 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen, Business Insider reports. However, if it continues to burn it would not only stop producing this oxygen and supporting wildlife, but it could also worsen climate change by triggering a ‘doomsday dieback scenario’.

This would ultimately result in dry leaves which, as well as being unable to absorb as much carbon, would be much more flammable and likely to spread fires – potentially causing the release of 140 billion tonnes of carbon stored in the Amazon into the atmosphere. As a result, global temperatures could rise even further.

Since the public were made aware of the devastating fire, millions rallied together to sign a petition urging the Brazilian government to ban the burning of the Amazon – something which could easily play a detrimental role in the climate emergency we are currently facing.

(Source: Unilad)

The town that breeds resistance to Malaria drugs

As new waves of the disease threaten the globe, worried scientists want to conduct a mass inoculation in a Cambodian region where new vaccines always seem to stop being effective

Pailin is a small settlement nestling in tropical rainforest near Cambodia’s border with Thailand. It is an unassuming town that lies at the centre of one of the country’s main logging areas. Pailin harbours secrets, however. It was in this town, in the late 1970s, that the Khmer Rouge set up one of its main strongholds and ruled Cambodia with a ferocity that caused at least two million deaths. It is a grim legacy, by any standards.

But Pailin has another unwanted claim to fame, one that is also associated with widespread death. The town, it transpires, lies at the heart of a region that has seen successive waves of resistance to malaria drugs arise in local people and then spread across the globe. The resulting death tolls can be measured in millions of lives, say scientists.

Just why malarial drug resistance has arisen here is not clear. Nevertheless scientists are emphatic: the region has seen the creation of several mutations in malaria parasites that have allowed them to shrug off medicines that once protected humans. Even worse, they have discovered that a new wave of malarial drug resistance has recently appeared in this tiny area and has already spread into Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, and begun to move into Myanmar and travel towards India and Bangladesh.

The prospect has so alarmed scientists and politicians that the issue is to be raised as an emergency topic to be debated at the heads of Commonwealth meeting in London next week (16-20 April). There are 19 Commonwealth member states in Africa, the continent that is the most vulnerable to malaria. According to World Health Organisation statistics, about 90% of all malaria deaths occur in Africa. Hence the concern of many Commonwealth heads of state who believe their homelands are most at risk of a spreading malarial resistance.

“The problem is that we are pussyfooting around,” said Professor Sir Nicholas White, of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit. “The World Health Organisation has not provided the necessary leadership. We need very firm direct action and at present we are not getting that.”

Resistance to major malaria drugs first appeared in the late 1950s when chloroquine -– then a highly effective successful treatment for the disease -– began to lose its efficacy. Crucially, this resistance first appeared in Pailin on the Cambodian-Thai border and then spread to Africa by the early 1980s. Several million deaths were added to the already grim toll of lives lost to the disease as a result.

A new set of drugs, known as sulfadoxine-pyrimethamines, was then developed and used to treat malaria. But once more resistance to the drugs appeared and again it first manifested itself around Pailin before spreading westwards. Again the disease’s death toll soared.

Then, at beginning of this century, a new set of malarial medicines was developed. Known as artemisinins, they were discovered in 1972 by Tu Youyou, a Chinese scientist who was awarded the 2015 Nobel prize in medicine for her work. Administered with a slower-acting second drug, artemisinins have become the medicine of choice for dealing with malaria across the globe, leading to improvements in malarial statistics with deaths and case numbers declining globally.

But now scientists have recently discovered once more that resistance to key malarial drugs has evolved -– and in exactly the same place as before: the farms and village that surround around Pailin. “That resistance has emerged in exactly the same place that resistance to chloroquine and then pyrimethamines emerged. The same very place. Around Pailin,” said White.

Just why this tiny region of south-east Asia has proved to be such a fertile zone for the emergence of deadly resistance to malarial medicine is not clear, a point stressed by Dominic Kwiatkowski, director of the centre for genomics and global health at Oxford University.

“We would love to know the answer, but it is not obvious,” Kwiatkowski told the Observer.

“One idea is that resistance keeps arising here for historical reasons. Maybe it has something to do with the way that malarial medicines are administered here. But how exactly?” In fact, the This theory is just one of a great many other suggestions that have been put forward to explain why this resistance is appearing here first.

A mosquito takes blood from a human host. Resistance to the latest anti-malarial drugs poses a major problem for scientists. Photograph: James Gathany/AP

The local strain of malaria parasites may have some special properties, or the ecology of the region may have features that boost the rise of resistance. “The crucial point is that we need to do something about it and once we have, we need to monitor the situation very, very carefully,” said Kwiatkowski.

One factor that has recently become clear is that malarial drug resistance appeared very quickly in the region. Writing in Lancet Infectious Diseasescorrect in February, researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institut and collaborators reported that resistance to combination therapies that included artemisinins arose almost as soon as the treatment was introduced as a first-line malarial drug. However, that this loss of efficacy was not spotted, for a variety of reasons, until several years had passed.

The implications of this failure were stressed by Ben Rolfe, head of the Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance. “On our watch, drug resistant strains have spread almost unnoticed,” he told the BMJ recently (pdf). “As a result, we now risk a global resurgence of the disease.”

Khmer families are screened for malaria in Pailin province in 2010. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

The question facing scientists -– and heads of state and health leaders -– is straightforward: what can be done? White -– who is scheduled to speak at the Commonwealth heads of state meeting -– is emphatic. “We have a window of opportunity but it is closing rapidly,” he told the Observer.

What is needed is a campaign, run with military efficiency, to use current drugs -– while they still have some efficacy -– not only on people who already have malaria but on those individuals who have been infected but who have not succumbed or shown symptoms of the disease.

“These individuals carry small numbers of parasites and although they don’t get ill they are sources of new infections,” said White. “Mosquitos bite them, take their blood and spread it to others. They are the source of new infections.”

The plan, proposed by White and other scientists, is that everyone in a village in a malaria hotspot should be treated with anti-malarial drugs -– regardless of their symptoms. “It is called mass drug administration. It is very controversial but it works -– if it is done as part of a concerted strategy. If you do it badly you will only make the problem of resistance worse. So this has to be done right. But if we don’t do it we won’t be able to eliminate malaria quickly enough, and if resistance worsens it may become untreatable,” says White.

In addition, it is proposed that a third anti-malarial drug be added to the combination therapy currently used to treat those who have actually succumbed to malaria: a triple whammy instead of a double. Next week, Britain’s Department for International Development is expected to announce support for trials using triple combination drugs.

For its part, WHO officials say that the dangers posed by the new malaria superbug are exaggerated and that better prevention efforts, monitoring and treatments will limit its spread from the Mekong region. Others are not so sure, however. The Malaria summit -– organised by the Ready to Beat Malaria campaign is to be held in London on 18 April at next week’s Commonwealth summit and will be attended by scientists and business leaders, including Bill and Melinda Gates. They are pressing for urgent commitments from all world leaders to battle the disease.

“We are currently on a cliff edge,” said a spokesman for Ready to Beat Malaria. “We can continue to battle the disease or risk an acute and deadly resurgence.”

This view is backed by White. “We are running out of time and unless we act rapidly, people will suffer and the people who will suffer most will be the children of Africa.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Last female speaker of indigenous Amazonian language murdered

The last female speaker of the Resígaro language has been murdered in Peru. Her body was found decapitated at her home in the Amazon rainforest.

Rosa Andrade was the last female speaker of the Resígaro language

Rosa Andrade, 67, lived with the Ocaina tribe. Her father was Ocaina and her mother Resígaro.

The Ocaina and Resígaro tribes were victims of the rubber boom, which began at the end of the nineteenth century. Tens of thousands of Indians were enslaved by rubber barons intent on extracting rubber in the Amazon. Many indigenous people died from sheer exhaustion, or were killed by violence and diseases like flu and measles to which they had no immunity.

The Resígaro tribe was eventually wiped out, and Rosa and her brother became the last remaining speakers of the language.

Rosa was also one of the last speakers of Ocaina and was regarded as a pillar of her community. She knew a wide repertoire of songs and stories in both languages and had recently been designated, by the government, to teach children Ocaina

Five thousand of the world’s six thousand languages are indigenous, and it is estimated that an indigenous language dies once every two weeks.

There are over a hundred uncontacted tribes worldwide, and their languages are the most endangered. Survival International is campaigning for the lands of uncontacted tribes to be protected, for where their rights are respected, they continue to thrive.

Rosa’s community suspects that an outsider, known for violent behavior, is responsible for the murder. However, the local prosecutor has declared that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute. The community is calling for a serious investigation to take place to find the culprit.

Source: Survival