Drought is deepening a health crisis among Peru’s recently contacted Indigenous Matsés

Peru's Matsés, who made first voluntary contact with outside missionaries in 1969, are facing a resurgence of malaria and a rising, still-untallied hepatitis B outbreak, according to anthropologists and health workers in the Yaquerana district. Health ministry data show hundreds of Matsés affected by malaria, worsened by drought and an intensifying El Niño that expand conditions for mosquito breeding.

Hepatitis B transmission hasn't been driven by drought directly, but the dry conditions have made river travel to health posts and hospitals difficult or impossible for remote communities. Community members describe trained health workers with no medication to give patients, while the government has yet to count how many people the hepatitis B outbreak has affected.

The Matsés territory sits within a 16-million-hectare corridor spanning Peru and Brazil that also hosts the world's largest known concentration of recently contacted and voluntarily isolated peoples, a region increasingly pressured by extractive industry expansion that raises risks of further epidemics through new contact.

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