What does it mean to be Healthy?

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, the definition of Healthy is “enjoying health and vigor of body, mind, or spirit”. But what I have discovered is that the more ‘developed’ a culture is, the more complex the definition of health is. In Nigeria, health was often defined by people I encountered, as fewer malarial occurrences and a lack of any other Infectious Diseases, particularly STDs. I am from the region of Nigeria with one of the most malarial infections (the red region at the Western bend of the continent) and I understand just how severe the issue is, but at the same time, I believe that other illnesses deserve at least some spotlight and care.

Most public health efforts were directed towards prevention of these two ailments. However, here in the states as in many other countries, health is more concerned with obesity (often caused because people have too much to eat)and its effects, heart disease, cancer and many other slightly ‘unpreventable’ diseases

These disparate ideas of what it means to be healthy will soon have to reconciled, because as the world grows to become a global ‘village’, so also do the ailments of a country soon become a global ailment. However, my main concern is the total and overly focused viewpoint of various developing countries on the main illnesses that trouble them. Using most of West Africa as a case study, these illnesses are mainly malaria, HIV and access to clean water. This narrow focus often disregards other individuals who are ill with ailments that are not as ‘popular’ or well-known in that part of the world. I go to school at the University of Chicago, where one of the prominent clinical researchers, Dr. Olopade works on Breast Cancer research on women of African descent. And as I discovered, her research subjects are patients in Chicago and also from women in Nigeria.Before coming here and hearing about her research, I naively assumed that cancer was a purely Western disease. This is just a single but very disturbing example of how little the general public is made to know of illnesses that aren’t defined as common in their society but still occur more rampantly than most Nigerians assume.

So this is the problem that now faces the developing world-because as they are in the process of ‘developing’ they now have contact with the ‘developed’ world, and thus also inherit her benefits and illnesses. While Malaria, Respiratory Infections and HIV continue to be the largest causes of mortality in West Africa, newer diseases are beginning to develop a presence. Both my maternal grandparents have hypertension, and my grandfather had symptoms of Alzheimer’s before he died. Heart disease is slowly becoming to have a forefront in African public health medicine, however public health efforts are rarely coordinated to healthy adults to change their nutrition. Most efforts are towards making sure people have food to get nutrition from, or are directed at those who are already sick. Because of the benefits of progress and longer life-expectancies for many Africans, the disease of the West are slowly becoming prevalent in Africa.

Thus my conclusion is this: health should be about complete well-being and should not just be concentrated on the most well-known disease in an area but should try to prevent all possible illnesses. If the developing world one day manages to eradicate hunger and malaria, they still have to face the plights of old age, heart disease, cancer, etc. And once again they will remain one step behind the developed world who have spent years fighting these ailments. So pub us not concentrate on one goal just because it is the most urgent, after all, bad things often start with good intentions.

-Onome U. Chicago IL, International Health Team, College Sophomore.

References:

http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2004/20040514-nigeria.html

http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2005/20050418-breast-cancer.html

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs314/en/index.html

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