By Ovidio Castro Medina La Chorrera, Colombia, Jan 27 (EFE).- An expedition aimed at discovering new species and identifying productive and sustainable biodiversity-based alternatives has gotten under way in the Colombian Amazon, a region sealed off from science for decades by the nation’s longstanding armed conflict. The “Bio, Alto Rio Igara-Parana” expedition, a collaboration between …
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Indigenous nurse Almeida Tananta battled heavy downpours of tropical rains as he rode his motorbike for hours across the red-soiled dirt tracks of Tabatinga, a municipality in Western Amazonas, which borders the Amazon rainforest and Colombia, and has the largest concentration of Indigenous Brazilians in the Amazon.
Tananta was en route to apply the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to the remote Umariacu villagers, in Alto Rio Solimoes. But when he arrived at the village of wooden-thatched houses skirting the banks of the Amazon river, the nurse’s hopes of vaccinating the 1,037 villagers quickly vanished.