Members of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) met at UN Headquarters in New York City and praised the Nyaryana Mya (Red Tent) medical-social project for screening tundra residents in Russia's Nenets Autonomous Area, the Area's government agencies website reports. UNPFII Vice-Chair Mariam Wallet Aboubakrine suggested spreading the project to all other ethnic regions which have an insufficient healthcare infrastructure.

"The Red Tent annual project has been implemented in the Nenets Autonomous Area since 2008, involving local authorities, medical organizations and companies using mineral resources. The purpose of the project is to mostly provide professional medical care to reindeer breeders and their families who undergo full-fledged medical checkups. Over a period of the past eight years, project participants have screened almost 5,000 area residents, including those from remote towns and villages," the website notes.

Under the project, tundra residents and reindeer breeders can undergo fluorography and ultrasound scans, have their electric cardiograms taken, their blood pressure measured, their tests taken, etc. Doctors provide medical assistance and issue them with first aid kits.

This year, as usual, a medical team is to spend ten days in the area in late November and early December  2017, with the financial support of petroleum giant LUKOIL. The team will fly to a remote Karataika village and include a pediatrician, a general practitioner, a surgeon-traumatologist, a neurologist, an optician, an endocrinologist, a skin and venereal diseases specialist, an ear, nose and throat specialist, a psychiatrist-narcologist, a clinical laboratory tests specialist, an ultrasonic scanner operator, a dentist and also a gynecologist.

According to the Area's Department of Healthcare, Labor and Social Protection, doctors mostly provide preventive medical treatment in remote districts, aiming to diagnose health disorders at an early stage, to determine their development-risk factors and to screen patients with chronic diseases.