Grandmothers often say to their children in T&T that they were not as sickly as their grandchildren. They are correct. Children today often seem to be sicker than children who lived 50 or 60 years ago. Several reasons account for this.
The population today is much larger than it used to be. In 1950 it was just over 600,000. It is double that today. The size of the island is the same. More people, more contact. Communicable disease (colds, the flu, Zika, gastro, Hand, Foot & Mouth etc) thrives on contact. It's not the number of children that causes the problem. Is we adults.
In 1950 there were 258,000 children under age 14 in T&T. In 2010 there were 265,000. Total population has risen but the proportion of children has fallen from 40 per cent in 1950 to 20 per cent in 2010. Granted that that population of children no longer stay home for the first five years. They are all in nurseries or day care and Early Childhood Development Centres passing their viruses around.
At the same time the proportion of elderly has doubled, from 4 per cent to 8 per cent, something that seems to have escaped the attention of the technocrats at the Ministry of Health but not the owners of private homes for the elderly which has seen an unsupervised surge in the last 15 years. Old people abuse is also up, often in these same homes. A situation ripe for some journalistic research. Nah, it's easier to write (sells more newspapers too) about children beaten to death or burned to a crisp. Also makes for a good photo shoot, seeing everybody cry about the little angels. Where was everyone when the child was being tortured? Where were they when the parents kept leaving the children alone? You did not know? In this, the most macocious country in the world?
We used to be protected from outside viruses by being an island. Like butter and condensed milk a virus might take two or three weeks to get here by ship from New Zealand or the UK. No more! Airplane travel has shortened that to hours. No time to get better on the boat down. Catch a virus in Brooklyn on Thursday, fly home Friday, fete Saturday and by Monday half town sick. Multiply that single visitor by thousands over Carnival, all playing in those huge,unwieldy money-making bands and you have the explanation for the post Carnival flu. And the post "summer" flu. And the post Christmas flu.
More people, more viruses. Add pollution into that mix and you have a delicious setup for disease. Trinidad has to be the most polluted Caribbean island. I'll quote from the Guardian of March 22, 2012:"T&T is among the most polluted small island states in the world. We dump more than 50 million plastic bottles in our dumps and one million glass bottles every month. Plastic, when exposed to heat creates one of the the deadliest toxins known to man. Doctors suspect it is related to the rising rates of cancer."
That's plastic pollution and as the Guardian said: "The classic images of plastic products blocking drains and rivers, and deposits of plastic debris floating or beached along our shorelines are powerful icons." Of pollution and of cancer!
Then there is air pollution, causing asthma and heart disease; water pollution causing gastroenteritis and worm infestation; oil spills with resulting rashes, bronchitis, contaminated seafood and mental health illness including anxiety, depression and posttrumatic stress disorder; garbage pollution and infectious disease including the mosquito related ones: dengue, Chik-V and Zika, as well as respiratory allergens; noise pollution producing hearing loss, heart attacks, stress related disorders, decreased cognitive development in children and possibly congenital malformations; soil pollution causing nausea, fatigue, skin rashes, red eye and more serious conditions like cancers (from benzene contamination); damaged brains (from lead) and kidney and liver disease (from mercury poisoning).
Is it worth repeating? "T&T is among the most polluted small island states in the world."
So, more people contact, more viruses and the ideal environment make T&T the place to get some serious illness.
Is there anything else to add to the mix? Sure. Check out our lifestyle. It's rush, rush, rush to make money to shop, play mas and pay school and doctor's fees. Traffic! Two hours sitting down in the car in the morning. Two more in the afternoon. Physiotherapists say you should not sit down for more than 20 minutes at a time so look for back problems in a couple years. No time for that deep, restful sleep that renews the brain and energises body and soul. No time to cook healthy food. Cheaper to buy fast food. No time for a good relaxing sweat. Tense up at work. In traffic. Watching the news. Dressing to fete.
In their 2001 book,Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, authors John de Graaf, David Wann and Thomas Naylor define affluenza as a deadly social disease "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more."
The list of affluena symptoms is long. Here are two of the most prominent. "Shopping fever", i.e. shopping to "relax". Shopping for entertainment and even as a vacation. It does not work. Second, "swollen expectations", i.e. confusing "want" with "need". The symptoms speak "to the spiritual and economic disorder at the heart of our lives, to the essential connectedness of the spiritual malaise and economic madness of our life". That is the real sickness of our time, granma.