The Biology and Health of Andean Migrants: A Case Study in South Coastal Peru

Abstract

Migration always entails a change in social environment and adjustment to unfamiliar institutions and surroundings. Andean migration frequently also entails a major change in physical environment when high-altitude natives move to low altitude and experience an abrupt. and extreme change in environmental features such as oxygen pressure, temperature, and humidity, which vary with altitude. Both historical and contemporary sources indicate that natives of one altitude encounter significant physiological difficulties in adapting to vastly different elevations and this knowledge has concerned Andean administrators and governors since Incan times (Buskirk, 1976; Frisancho et al., 1973; Monge, 1948; Monge, 1963; Noble et al., 1974). At the present time, there is massive migration from high to low altitude in the Andes and the consequences for the migrants are not known. Indeed, as reported in the MAB 6 meeting in La Paz (UNESCO, 1975), this problem is viewed as a critical one in the Central Andes. Theories of biological adaptation and of social change predict deleterious sequelae of migration, at least temporarily, since migrants are in the process of adapting to a number of changed environmental features. For example, migrants may experience change in population density, population size, occupation, be newly introduced into cash economies and to western medical systems and experience changes in the physical environment. A further prediction is that the more changes a migrant undergoes, the greater the difficulty he has in adjusting. Therefore, migrants between altitudinal belts who experience all of these changes are expected to have greater difficulty in adapting than migrants within belts who do not experience the altitudinal change. However, a confounding