DR JOY ST JOHN
THE WORLD has been battling the covid19 pandemic for over a year and the Caribbean Public Health Agency's (Carpha) Annual Health Research Conference, as a face-to-face event, was one of the many casualties of the forced need to separate to avoid transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Truth be told, a microscopic organism has completely reshaped this 65th conference (Wednesday to Saturday).
First its title 'Pandemic, NCDs and Climate Change - The Caribbean's triple threat' will allow Carpha to showcase the research in this region on the worst pandemic the world has known. The records will show that after a year of covid19, there are fewer deaths than the 50-100 million of the 1918 pandemic.
However, I defend that claim by outlining the level of social disruption with record levels of gender, domestic and racial violence, and educational disruption, which has been the frustration of teacher and student alike with four-year-olds spending hours staring at a screen instead of being socialised with their friends and at play.
Add to that the illness and death from acute covid19 and the mental ill health and other systemic complications of 'long covid' of the survivors and MIS-C (multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children) which affects children.
Then, combine that with the economic disaster that covid19 has caused, with billions of dollars in lost revenue as whole industries and sectors literally stopped, businesses closed after over a century of profitability and millions fell into the poverty and homelessness that they never envisaged even in March 2020.
Finally, we are witnessing one of the most ethically shameful times of our lives, when vaccines are purchased in excess, unwanted by the residents of those states, while other states watch their citizenry die because of lack of access to the same vaccines.
As dire as this picture is, it is in the context of the ongoing existential threats to mankind - climate change and NCDs.
The impacts of climate change are currently unpreventable, as the actions of our recent ancestors have set the world on an unchangeable course of environmental destruction, which has already caused a whole Caribbean island, Barbuda, to be evacuated in 2017 due to the destructive effects of a truly severe hurricane season. Our current actions can only change effects decades in the future! So, this year's research conference presentations are even more important, as we search for evidence to inform policy and programming, that combat climate change, in this new world that covid19 is forcing us to create.
The slow burn of the NCDs (non-communicable diseases) pandemic, which, unlike climate change, we can still do much to prevent, continues to be the greatest cost to our health systems and economies as we in the Caribbean have an unacceptably high prevalence of the NCDs and their risk factors.
With loss of productive years increasing, because young people and even children have risk factors of
