Clara Mantini-Briggs

Stories In The Time Of Cholera Race And Public Health In Venezuela

n 1992 and 1993 some five hundred people died in the maze of rivers and thousands of large and small islands that form the delta region of the Orinoco River in eastern Venezuela. The disease that killed so many so quickly was cholera. One of us, Charles, stumbled onto the epidemic in November 1992 during a two-week visit to Tucupita, a city of some 40 thousand inhabitants and the capital of Delta Amacuro state. Clara was working for the regional office of the Ministry of Health and Public Assistance, and she helped to coordinate efforts to prevent the spread of the epidemic. Many friends from the delta were living on the streets of Tucupita and nearby Barrancas del Orinoco, another small city on the edge of the delta, begging and performing odd jobs to survive, sleeping in shelters con-