Dudukwe and his group are rapidly depleting Tanzania’s wildlife by hunting and consuming almost every animal they encounter. The Hadzabe people stand in sharp contrast. Unlike the surrounding pastoralist and farming communities, the Hadzabe neither grow crops nor raise livestock for slaughter. As one Hadzabe member once asked a journalist, “Why stand in a field all day and wait for weeks or months for food?”
They are widely celebrated as one of the last true hunter-gatherer societies remaining on Earth.
However, increased contact with outsiders carries serious health risks for both sides. Visitors can easily introduce diseases such as measles to isolated groups like the Hadzabe, often with devastating consequences. Because these pathogens have not circulated in their population before, they lack the immunity that most people take for granted. An illness that barely troubles us can prove fatal to them.
By the same token, the Hadzabe may carry endemic bacteria and pathogens to which they have developed resistance over generations. Having long hunted and eaten baboons, monkeys, and bats, they have likely adapted to certain local diseases that could be extremely dangerous — even deadly — to unexposed