Health of Brazilian Indigenous Populations: historical vulnerabilities and the confrontation of COVID-19 today

Abstract

For most of the history of indigenous health in Brazil, the diverse groups have relied only on their health resources to face "new" diseases. The Arouca Law, in 1999, was the sector's organizational framework and established the Indigenous Health Care Subsystem; before that, only random health actions took place as a form of social protection for these peoples. In 2002, was approved the National Policy for the Attention to Health of Indigenous Peoples and in 2010, the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health was created to manage the subsystem. This record signaled greater health vulnerabilities to these peoples, including the current Sars-Cov-2 pandemic scenario. This is an integrative review, about how COVID-19 involved Brazilian indigenous territories in a specific and worrying way. With greater number of cases for these groups, and suggestion of deeper impacts due to the impossibility of indigenous identity and the need to improve information on indigenous health system, contextualization is necessary to understand these current (and old) outcomes of indigenous health. Even with previous signs, the impacts of this disease included irreparable cultural losses, due to the risk characteristics of the disease and their oral tradition ways of life and, reaching many guardians of the knowledge of Brazilian indigenous peoples.