Word: navajos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What has brought them crowding together is an illness that is baffling * scientists and panicking the 175,000 residents of the 17 million-acre Navajo nation. So far, 18 people have been struck with what is being called "unexplained adult respiratory-distress syndrome." Almost all the victims have lived on or near the reservation, which stretches across northwestern New Mexico and into Arizona and Utah. Of the 11 who have died, nine are Indians. The outbreak came to light last month, when a young Navajo man fell ill on his way to the funeral of his 24-year-old girlfriend...
...elderly, who have immature or weakened immune systems, this one primarily attacks the young and healthy. "The pattern is different than anything I've ever seen," says Dr. Frederick Koster, an infectious-disease specialist at University Hospital in Albuquerque. The latest fatality was a 13-year-old Navajo girl, who collapsed after dancing at a school graduation party at Red Rock State Park outside Gallup. "I will see that scene for the rest of my life," says Sammy Trujillo, a park manager. "Her mother was screaming, 'Somebody save my child!' and there was nothing I could...
...search for a culprit has been complicated by Indian customs. Navajos do not speak of the dead for fear it might slow the spirit's trip to the afterlife. Nor do they permit autopsies. Tribal members tend to view an untimely death with shame, since it might be interpreted as punishment for bad living. Indeed, some Indian elders were linking the illness to the adoption of fast food, MTV and video games. In radio broadcasts, Navajo president Peterson Zah beseeched his intensely private people to cooperate with health-care workers...
...encouraging note is that the illness does not appear to be highly contagious. But that has not stemmed concern on and off the reservation. Last week a private day school in Los Angeles canceled a long-planned visit of 27 Navajo third-graders from Chinle, Arizona, fearing the children might be carrying the disease...
Peter MacDonald's 14-year effort to build an independent Navajo Nation for America's largest Indian tribe was hobbled by repeated run-ins with the law. His latest setback: a 14 1/2-year sentence from a Phoenix federal judge for his role in a 1989 riot at the tribe's Window Rock, Arizona, headquarters, where two of his supporters were killed. MacDonald, 64, will serve the term concurrently with previous sentences: five years from a 1992 federal racketeering case and seven years from a 1990 case in which he was convicted by a tribal court of accepting kickbacks and bribes...