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Nettleford
The following are excerpts from the address delivered at the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) media awards ceremony, by Professor Rex Nettleford, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI), in Barbados on October 18.
ALL FREEDOMS speak to social and individual well-being as some people now describe civilised governance; and journalists, by definition, have a vested professional interest in this challenge.
So the work, specifically with Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), i.e. in terms of meeting the mission of sensitising and empowering our people on health issues, is simply part of the broader mission of saving us from the hegemony of unconscionable minority interest groups or the pervasive tyranny of the majority.
In some parts of the world, not far from us here, television journalism has been rebuked for its obvious biases, one of which has been cited by a recent author as "an oppressive bias in favour of the pharmaceutical industry."
So "night after night network news-shows browbeat viewers with ads suggesting they nag their doctors into prescribing expensive prescription drugs".
Is this the case in the Caribbean? Which journalist is strong enough to stay clear of such biases?
The case I have just cited has to do with health. But the region has no say in the pharmaceutical empire of our globalised world.
The Canasol distilled by Caribbean scientists from marijuana, a genuine Caribbean product, is yet to find a place globally in the pharmaceutical industry though a great many 'dark-eye' Jamaicans have long felt that glaucoma can find a cure in their country's indigenous ethnomedical dispensary.
Cuba, we hear, has long discovered what Pfizer eventually made capital of; and sugar cane - that most Caribbean of crops - has been the source of ateromixol which we hear helps in what Viagra now claims to have a monopoly on.
The Cuban drug which was meant to lower the cholesterol proved highly efficient in enhancing the libido. Surely this is news worthy!
And speaking about ethnomedicine, how much does Caribbean journalism know of the ancestral pedigree that inheres in Caribbean folk wisdom about remedies for all manner of afflictions known time out of mind?
There is an aspect of it all that should be of interest to the journalist. As I have said elsewhere "the difficulty of access to safe and reliable health care by persons in the lower socio-economic groups (or) by those tenanting far-away habitats, miles from well equipped urban health care centres, drives such persons to modes of self-delivery of health care in the exploration of, experimentation with, and liberal use of bush teas, and medicinal herbs".
Despite well-documented dangers of the indiscriminate use of medicinal herbs, based on scientific evidence, not even the World Health Organisation (WHO), or PAHO its regional agency in the Western Hemisphere, would deny the wisdom of some exploration of the "unknown" and indeed of the still scientifically unverified bodies of beliefs held by many of our people who are the inheritors of ancestral data. And some of the guess work has worked after all.
The scientific challenge is to discover why they have worked at all. And journalism is a very necessary handmaiden in the process.
The contemporary counterpart designated "alternative medicine" should therefore not be ridiculed out of existence.
Nor, I may add, should it become an obsession of the irresponsible journalist who may wish to be unique and different in dialoguing with readers.
Science remains "higher science" to many of us ready to try anything often in the name of the Lord.
Obeah by any name is still bunguzoo. Journalists, as public communicators, must be discriminating in sifting the knowledge they are called upon to share with a too often unsuspecting public.
INTEGRITY OF JOURNALISTS
This brings me to the question of the integrity of the journalism profession and of journalists themselves.
The claim for freedom has to be predicated on a probity that leaves the claimant free of counterclaims that are tantamount to the denial, in the case of the journalist, of the right to freedom of expression albeit within the ambit of the law, assuming the law is just, reasonable and workable.
The power comes these days in what someone referred to as "journalism talk".
As in the United States, journalism talk is arguably a great part of the backdrop for non-stop noise of Caribbean life with talk, cross talk, talk-back, and bad-talk. Much of this indulges in, or rather celebrates, trivia.
In this. the publisher/manager must take a good deal of the responsibility. For if newspapers and television networks are a tale of big money and greed, it stands to reason that having turned themselves into cash machines, newspapers and television networks must go where the cash is.
And if trivia attract cash, the choice is clear. Without profit the argument would quite plausibly remind detractors that journalists, high-minded or otherwise, cannot find work.
Small wonder, then, that many a high-minded journalist who must earn a living to survive are bound to feel that compromise is mandatorily part of the deal.
Such are the consequences when delivering profit becomes the daily driving force of a newspaper or radio and television network. Profit becomes more important than product and the business end outweighs the public service end.
So when trivia earn profits over public service, too bad for public service. Advertisers understandably aim at their potential clientele and the press aims at advertisers for their own survival. Such is the vicious circle that crowds out such 'dull' and 'non-sexy' topics as health.
The once hallowed duty of journalism to keep a democratic society (meaning a participatory democracy), in well-informed condition is said to be virtually lost since a page or televised line-up of beauty queens in preparation for a Miss World contest in a country where a woman is doomed to be stoned to death for bearing a child out of wedlock, makes better juicier news to some and is likely to sell more newspapers than a serious discussion about the health and welfare of that very grieving mother and others of the child-bearing members of the species.
Can you imagine how many West Indian mothers would have been stoned should a barbaric law like that were to exist in these verdant isles where bastardy no longer carries quite the shame it once did - thanks to the Status of Children Laws enacted since 1976 and after throughout the region?
The health of child-bearing mothers is after all one of the big questions challenging the development process in developing countries to find solutions that will guarantee to half of the human beings tenanting Planet Earth their humanity.
HOW IT RELATES TO THE CARIBBEAN
A United Nations report entitled A Better World For All released at a global summit meeting in Geneva in June, 2000, revealed that each year more than half a million women die from causes related to pregnancy and child birth, with 99 per cent of those deaths occurring in developing countries.
I repeat the question I have always asked - what proportion of that 99 per cent constitute Caribbean women?
Each year some 11 million children die from preventable disease and again the question for us has to be how many of that 11 million are inhabitants of our region?
Then there are more than one billion people in the developing world who lack safe drinking water. Water-bearing diseases are rampant in the developing world and children are more often the most vulnerable victims.
What is the situation in the Caribbean? Isn't this sexy enough for the media (news and features) to spend some time on and get the populace who read newspapers, listen to radio and view television to tune into such matters which are critical to their survival?
It is true that life expectancy in our region is respectably high compared with other places in the developing world but good health is a fragile business that requires constant tending.
The disappearance of malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis and chigoe of yore is a reality among us - thanks to the information that flooded primary schools about these communicable and chronic diseases and the remedies for prevention and cure.
But such old diseases are either reappearing as in the case of malaria and tuberculosis or new ones have claimed currency thanks to effective detection due to the improvement in medicine.
So hypertension, diabetes and obesity have become lifestyle diseases rampant among our population with all the attendant ills that accompany the stricken into a longer life, albeit a life of decreasing quality.
West Indian men are living long enough to discover that the deterioration of the plumbing and related prostate problems are running in tow with cervical and breast cancer that their female counterparts long knew had to be taken into account.
In fairness, the press this past week has filled its pages, if not its television screens, with data accompanied by graphic illustrations of breasts in jeopardy including men's pectorals. The responsibility of the press to get our male population around to delivering health care to themselves by visiting a doctor's office every once in a while cannot however be over-emphasised.
And then there is the HIV/AIDS pandemic which to this generation of Caribbean souls seems to be what tuberculosis was to mine.
It threatens not only the immune system but also, in development terms, the region's lifeline tourist industry which in some places has been accused of being the chief conduit of the dreaded disease.
And here I must acknowledge the contribution by PAHO which brought to the region's attention greater consciousness of the matter as far back as three years ago in Chapter 3, Volume 1 of its Health in the Americas data which are invaluable to our knowledge of health issues.
The comparative statistics, sub-region by sub-region on page 142 of the volume, did send a wake-up call to the English-speaking Caribbean whose youthful populations were and still are in clear danger of premature extinction with the spread of the disease among young men, young women of child-bearing age and children born to such mothers with the HIV virus.
We are reportedly second only to Southern Africa in the rate of infection. The implications for the future growth and development of Africa South of the Sahara are grimly far-reaching.
The disappearance of thousands who die daily there, is robbing that Continent of its cadre of young people on whom the hope of future prosperity depends.
ROLE OF THE UWI
The Caribbean is in danger of replicating the tragedy and depriving our countries of the throughput from our educational efforts over the past 50 years at least. All the more reason why public support from the public purse to the regional UWI must not be threatened.
The UWI which started as a medical school remains a true institution of growth and instrument of regional development as CARICOM Heads of Governments acknowledged many years ago at Grand Anse, Grenada.
I would want to caution contributing governments against having the institution which has served the region so well, wither on the vine.
Its plans for increased development research are issues ranging from poverty and environmental degradation to health care and human resources development deserve better than the threat of having them scuttled.
That chapter in the PAHO publication is a must for development planners, academic investigators and journalists especially those with a full grasp of their role to help our society get the best from the members of a productive population reaching adulthood in the new millennium.
Health and education, as I have many times said, mean an investment in the human resource.
Understood this way, journalists can justify their professional pledge to faithfully inform the citizenry, and to comfort the afflicted even while some of us would add, "and to afflict the comfortable."
Schools and hospitals have a particular relevance for us in this region; they both have to do with the human being's trajectory of life from cradle to grave, and from infancy to old age.
There is need for greater continuing public education in health and health care covering all branches of medicine.
But I again use this opportunity to recommend to Caribbean journalists greater focus on the epidemiologic transition that the region is undergoing and ask for a firm commitment to what one of my colleagues, Dr. McCaw-Binns, observed to be a priority in the region at this time.
She said that "the control of the major chronic diseases will require renewed health promotion efforts at the community level to bring about the lifestyle changes needed to reduce the risk associated with development of HIV, hypertension and diabetes, to ensure that our mothers have a positive reproductive experience and that our children have the best chances to survive to become health productive members of society."
RESPONSIBILITY TO
DEVELOPMENT
The profession of journalism cannot escape its responsibilities to such development imperatives, clearly stated in these three major tasks.
The freedom from disease, as I indicated earlier on, is that much closely related to the freedom from ignorance and the freedom from hunger; and all three conditions are the hallmarks of poverty, the alleviation and eradication of which have become of the big questions on the development agenda.
Put this way, journalists can grasp the gravamen of health issues becoming one of the genuinely pivotal subjects of their profession impacting on the ostensibly more profitable subjects which range from beauty contests which after all have to do with the parading of healthy ladies, to sports which depend on good health for performance and the news value of such performance.
Health issues indeed impact on all that is human existence and remain fundamental to development.
The development process began to make more sense, after all, once our planners and developmentalists decided to place the human being, in terms of his or her hopes and aspirations of ideas about self, and of perceptions of a world he or she wishes to tenant with dignity, at the centre of plans, policies and programmes targeting both bottom-line profit and the enhancement of the quality of life.
Good health as a key index of the quality of life and as a positive measurement of the social capital then took on new life and meaning.
Good health care delivery, we now know, depends as much on delivery to self by self as on the preventive and curative measures put in place by official health authorities.
Both, in turn, depend on bodies of knowledge that are the fruit of painstaking observation, rigorous analysis and systematic explication. And this is what PAHO was clearly intended to provide.
I would like Caribbean journalists to be part of what I see as an ongoing commemoration and exploration of what has been aptly termed the majesty of scientific medicine and the magnitude of nature's enigmatic powers which continue to elude the most learned of experts among us.
For isn't the job of journalism to bring to the consciousness of us ordinary mortals a better understanding of the paradoxes and conundrums of everyday living?
Our region in its current contradictory, unruly, groping, near chaotic but nonetheless exciting state, deserves no less!
