PANAMA: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE RAISE ALARMS ABOUT ...
OTC 19.12.97 02:47
PANAMA CITY, (Dec. 17) IPS - Indigenous leaders are again raising
an alarm against gene robbery by unscrupulous scientists among
their people, a practice they say is money-motivated and exempt
from international agreements on human rights.
The first alarm was sounded several years ago when the genes of a
Panamanian Ngobe-Bugle woman were patented in the United States
as a scientific discovery by two U.S. researchers.
The woman, whose name was withheld, was a resident in the
Caribbean province of Bocas del Toro. She was a carrier of the
HLV2 virus, which is similar to the virus that produces AIDS.
Kuna indigenous leader Atencio Lopez has run an international
campaign against the "stealing" of genes from native
peoples for the last four years. He told IPS the genes were taken
from the woman by foreign researchers with the help of local
doctors who extracted the blood.
The Ngobe-Bugle are carriers of HLV2 but they do not develop the
associated illnesses, as they have antibodies which protect them.
Lopez explained that as AIDS "is like El Dorado" for
the big pharmaceutical transnationals, anything close to the
virus "makes them crazy and they will stop at nothing to get
hold of and control their formulas."
The patent of the HLV2 virus was canceled by the U.S. government
following international pressure. But the cells of the
Ngobe-Bugle woman and other indigenous people from Papua New
Guinea and the Solomon Islands that were also patented, are still
in a U.S. laboratory.
Lopez said the indigenous people were willing to undergo testing
as part of a not-for-profit study for the production of medicines
to alleviate suffering.
But they do not approve being studied and having genes extracted
to produce medicines for the profit of the transnational
pharmaceutical companies, nor for experimentation with biological
weapons "so that the powerful states can submit the weaker
ones," Lopez warned.
Lopez said the cloning of animals and other genetic experiments
"is part of an offensive by the biomedical and
pharmaceutical multinationals to carry out research for new
medicines using human genes."
Lopez said the U.S., Japan and the EU nations were accelerating
the creation of dispositions to allow them to research and patent
"discoveries" made from human beings.
"Faced with this, the indigenous population is still one of
the weakest groups because, unfortunately their human rights are
still not recognized in the majority of national constitutions
and international agreements," said Lopez.
He said the United Nations Education, Science and Culture
Organization (UNESCO) was considering a document on ethics and
the handling of the human genome.
"For us this is not enough because the transnational
companies are still favored," Lopez said.
The indigenous peoples have created an international network to
deal with the problem, which is summed up in the "Kupseni
Declaration" drawn up in November. Lopez described as it as
"the leading document on the human genome produced in Latin
America."
The document is named after the island home of the Kuna people
off the Caribbean archipelago of San Blas, where several of the
native peoples of the Americas met to draw it up.
This type of research, said the document, "attacks human
lives" and "the genetic integrity of the indigenous
peoples."
Lopez explained that for the indigenous peoples, blood "is
like the nucleus or the cell of the earth" whose fruits,
like the trees, animals and rivers "are considered as
brothers."
"If we allow them to delve inside human beings and their
genetics, there will come a moment when we will be the slaves of
other people and subjected to immoral use," he said.
"We do not see knowledge as personal property but as
something belonging to all our people," said Lopez.
As well as the robbing of human genes, researchers in rich
countries "are extracting medicinal secrets from the
indigenous people and their cultural property on seeds and soil
use practices," he added.
He explained how researchers of traditional medicine arrived in
the indigenous areas as tourists to find out how local people
cure certain illnesses. These "tourists" then the
remedies to the North and patented them as though they were their
own inventions, Lopez said.
The Third World states do not protect the indigenous people and
farmers from cultural pillaging and "many governments see
the indigenous peoples' complaints as science fiction," he
concluded.
Copyright 1997