Indigenous people, who make up around 6% of the world's population, hold valuable knowledge about our environment and its medicines. However, as the series reveals, their health is considerably poorer than their non-indigenous counterparts in numerous areas. Life expectancy is substantially lower for indigenous people, and disparities exist in rates of infectious diseases, heart disease, and diabetes. Access to health services and health education is often worse for indigenous peoples, while even in wealthy countries such as Canada, the USA, New Zealand and Australia, suicides, alcohol, and drug-related problems are common in indigenous communities. For isolated indigenous peoples in Asia, Latin America, and Africa the situation is even more severe: routinely they face expulsion from their lands, human rights abuses, the introduction of 'new' diseases, and exploitation of the natural resources they have protected.
In their paper 'Disappearing, displaced, and undervalued: a call to action for Indigenous health worldwide' researchers from The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) are calling for greater respect for the views of indigenous peoples in all research and policies affecting them. They say that that major international policies like the MDGs encourage targets to maximise health benefits for the majority, ignoring health issues facing minority groups, such as indigenous communities.
"the Millennium Development Goals as they stand today could be achieved even while whole populations of Indigenous peoples disappear. Yet indigenous peoples are affected by all the goals related to hunger, ed
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Contact: Joe Santangelo
j.santangelo@elsevier.com
212-633-3810
Lancet
25-May-2006