One of the last uncontacted tribes emerged from the Amazon jungle last month and promptly caught a disease which could wipe out their entire population – the flu. 
 
 Five men and two women from the Chitonahua hunter-gatherer tribe left their home in Peru and entered the village of Ashaninka just across the border in the Brazilian state of Acre. 
 
 Within days, all had contracted influenza, said Carlos Travassos of Funai, Brazil’s national Indian foundation. “Without medical treatment they certainly could have died,” he said. 
 
 The tribespeople carried wooden spears and bows and arrows and wore only bark belts. 
 
 Doctors were flown in to the remote village and were able to talk to the nomads through an interpreter who knew a similar language, persuading them to take medicine that helped them to recover before they went home to their people. 
 
 “At first they were afraid and wary, but thankfully in the end they understood, believed us, trusted the medical team and accepted the medicine,” said Travassos. “It was a difficult and slow dialogue.” 
 
 Entire tribes have been exterminated after making contact with the outside world. 
 
 “The uncontacted Indians now face the same genocidal risk from disease and violence which has characterized the invasion and occupation of the Americas over the last five centuries,” said Survival International, a charity that supports indigenous peoples. 
 
 Some experts believe a series of plagues swept through the aboriginal populations of the Americas, including what is now the United States, after first contact with Europeans introduced a suite of pathogens to which they had no natural immunity. 
 
 There are at least four uncontacted tribes in Acre and two more over the border in Peru. They are thought to be descendants of natives who were enslaved during a rubber boom at the end of the 19th century. 
 
 Illegal loggers and drug traffickers are said to be moving into the tribes’ traditional lands. Brasilia has warned that they face impending death. 
 
 “The group told us their tribe had been shot at by white men,” said Travassos. 
 
 Stephen Cory, Survivals director, said: “Both Peru and Brazil gave assurances to stop the illegal logging and drug trafficking which are pushing uncontacted Indians into new areas. They’ve failed. The traffickers even took over a government installation meant to monitor their behaviour.” 
 
 Although most uncontacted indigenous people are aware of outside societies, they typically avoid contact by hiding or shooting arrows at intruders. 
 
 The tribe met with a local environmental group, Frente de Proteção Etnoambiental Envira, the Brazilian government said. The environmental group had been tracking the tribe as it moved closer and closer to the Ashaninka settlement in recent weeks. ||||| Late last week, Brazil’s Indian affairs department (FUNAI) publicly announced an event that many anthropologists and medical researchers had feared. In the remote Brazilian state of Acre, members of a long-isolated Amazon tribe have contracted influenza after making voluntary contact with the outside world. Some researchers now fear that the contacted individuals, who speak a Panoan language, will spread the potentially fatal virus to other nonimmunized members of their tribe. 
 
 Late last month, members of the tribe emerged from the forest along the Upper Envira River in Brazil, raiding the village of another remote but settled tribe, and then contacting members of a FUNAI team and spending up to 3 weeks in their company. Researchers suspect that the newly contacted people were fleeing illegal loggers and cocaine traffickers in part of their home territory in a Peruvian park. Apparently, the tribespeople picked up influenza from this recent contact, according to the FUNAI announcement. Flu virus is potentially deadly to isolated tribespeople because they have no immunity to it, and such transmission is exactly what anthropologists and medical experts hope to avoid during contact. In case after case, contact has proved tragic as diseases like flu and measles decimated previously isolated tribes. 
 
 According to the FUNAI announcement, a government medical team treated the newly infected tribespeople and gave them flu immunizations. But the contacted people then slipped back into their forest home—a development that alarms many researchers. “We can only hope that [the FUNAI team members] were able to give out treatment before the sickness was spread to the rest of the tribe in the forest,” says Chris Fagan, executive director at the Upper Amazon Conservancy in Jackson, Wyoming. “Only time will tell if they reacted quickly enough to divert a catastrophic epidemic.” 
 
 While FUNAI’s medical officials worked with the tribe, another group of researchers has tentatively identified their culture: The tribe in question may be part of a larger group of Chitonahua people, says Adam Bauer-Goulden, president of the Rainforest Rescue Coalition in Chicago, Illinois. A village of some 40 to 100 tribespeople, believed to be Chitonahua, was photographed from the air in a village along the Xinane River, not far south of the contact area, and the body ornamentation and haircuts of these villagers closely resemble those of the newly contacted group (photo above). Bauer-Goulden thinks the newly contacted folk may come from that exact village. A group of previously contacted Chitonahua now live along the Yurúa River in Peru. 
 
 FUNAI noted in the announcement that the newly contacted group said that they had been violently attacked by outsiders. The Xinane River village lies along a major route used by cocaine smugglers, notes Bauer-Goulden, who suspects that “the narcotraffickers pushed them out” of their own lands. 
 
 But for now, the immediate worry is disease transmission. It’s possible that the tribespeople picked up other diseases such as malaria during contact. If so, they could conceivably spread the newly acquired pathogens to other members of their tribe. Fiona Watson, research director for Survival International, a nongovernmental organization based in London that seeks to support indigenous tribes, also worries that FUNAI may not have sufficient medical resources on the ground nearby in the event of an epidemic. “There does not seem to be a health team in situ right now,” Watson says. “FUNAI says it will send in a team but only next month.” 
 
 It’s a worrisome situation, says anthropologist Robert Walker of the University of Missouri, Columbia. “We are just hearing of one of the many contacts that are going on in this region,” he says. “If you think of how many loggers and narcotraffickers there are in this region, and that there could be as many as 3000 to 4000 uncontacted people there, the potential for contact is huge.”
– When an isolated tribe emerged from the Amazon in recent weeks and initiated contact with Brazilian scientists in the village of Ashaninka near the Peruvian border, some called the move "potentially tragic"—and, indeed, though they were quickly quarantined for their own safety, all five men and two women were sick with the flu within days. After extensive back-and-forth with doctors flown into the remote village, the reluctant tribespeople agreed to take medicine, and no one died, Forbes reports. Still, according to Brazil's Indian protection agency, FUNAI, researchers now fear that the tribespeople, who were given flu shots before they returned to the jungle, may have brought the disease to their home and spread it to other vulnerable people, Science reports. "Only time will tell if they reacted quickly enough to divert a catastrophic epidemic," says one expert. Some experts say that diseases are likely responsible for wiping out many aboriginal populations up and down the Americas over the past 500 years. With neither natural immunity nor modern medicine, diseases they've never encountered can prove punishing and deadly. Officials think the tribe initiated contact (something so rare it hasn't happened in the Amazon in decades, Popular Science reports) because of continued harassment by illegal loggers and drug traffickers who have moved into their lands—"The group told us their tribe had been shot at by white men," says a FUNAI worker. It's unclear whether they got the flu from that contact, from villagers in places they'd recently raided for food and tools, or from the scientists they met when they emerged from the jungle. Researchers say the tribe may be part of the Chitonahua people; they wore only bark belts and carried wooden spears, bows, and arrows. (One advocacy group says the tribe may have reached out because it feels it has "nowhere left to go.")