The media and health of Africans in Africa and the Diaspora. SJ Dodgson. MJoTA 2012 v5n1 p0608
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.
MJoTA.org
I publish Medical Journal of Therapeutics Africa, known as
MJoTA. MJoTA was first published as a pdf every 4 months, starting in January
2007. It was jammed with articles that were mostly written by faculty and
students about a disease or organization working in Africa. All these articles
are still available on the mjota.org website, everything that has been
published is still there. When I say it is the world’s largest privately
published collection of articles about health in African communities, I mean
it!
This
undertaking has been thrilling. I have traveled to the continent of
Africa 7 times, to Nigeria mostly but also Kenya and Sierra Leone. In
2010 I was in Haiti observing and trying to help some nurses the first
month after the catastrophic earthquake. In 2011 I was in Antigua &
Barbuda working on a radio station. I have been arrested in Kenya in
2008 and in Brooklyn in 2011. In 2009 I was hit on my face with my
camera in Mayor Bloomberg's campaign headquarters, after being served by
a Nigerian lawyer papers for a $20million lawsuit in US Federal Court.
After the judge threw out the lawsuit, the lawyer was ordained a lady
evangelist and was awarded a PhD in criminal justice from Walden
University. God bless America!
Medical Journal of Therapeutics Africa has evolved into 2
tightly intertwined websites. One is mjota.org, the other is drsusanna.org. The
opening page of drsusanna.org is called Daily Updates, and through daily essays
posted onto this page, the reader is directed to articles, audio, video,
resources that have been posted that day, or maybe have not been discussed for
some months.
Today is Friday, and on Friday I post 2 full-length movies
which can be watched free. Last week was a German Fassbender movie which was
quite disturbing, so I also posted a movie about how Marines saved the earth
from Martians. Lovely. Tonight we have a movie from India that can be danced to
and the Pink Panther. India loves Africa and supplies a great many of the
medicines, and a panther is African?
Meanwhile the visitor to the site will be directed to resources on how
to lower blood sugar.
Who am I?
I am an immigrant into African communities, I have left
behind my family, my friends, my stable income and my opportunities. I have
done this to publish MJoTA.org, to publish stories about health in African
communities, and write about African professionals who do everything they can
to encourage health. Since the biggest creator of health is peace and prosperity,
MJoTA.org has many stories about banks, war heroes, peace heroes.
I am very good at being an immigrant. Since the age of 5, it
is what I have done best.
I was born in England
to English and Irish physicians, Michael
and Patience, who met in the heart of the British Empire while bombs
were dropping.
My father’s grandparents had enough intellectual curiosity
and money to decide to hang out in India and do mysticism for 5 years, during
which time my grandfather was born, and my great-grandfather died and was
buried in Dharmsala.
When I was 5, my brothers and I were taken by boat across
the Irish Sea to Ireland to live with my widowed and well-travelled Irish
grandmother Helen: she may have been an Olympic diver, but I have not verified
this. At 25 Helen hopped on a boat to teach in Nova Scotia. She returned to Ireland 2 years later and
married her sister’s fiancé.
When I was 6, my mother took us back by boat to England, and we
climbed onto a boat which sailed for 7 weeks to New Zealand, stopping at Samoa,
Curacao, Panama, Tahiti, Fiji and 2 more countries that I have forgotten. I was 6.
After 3 years of living in New Zealand in Paradise amongst the pohutukawa
and tuis, with the addition of another brother, we climbed onto a boat for
Australia.
My British family left New Zealand on October 1, 1960, the
same day that the British left Cyprus, and Nigeria. It was 15 years after
the end of World War 2, and the British Empire was breaking apart.
I grew up in Australia. Christmas was only successful if my
brothers and I had enough mangoes and a stack of books that lasted until New
Year. We had access to information at
all times, and we had adults and children interested in discussing health,
politics.
Not religion, not sex. To this day I don’t know how to
discuss those topics. You will never find pornography or overt religious
messages on mjota sites. And nothing about genital mutilation or rape or sexual
slavery, all of which stories can rapidly descend into pornography.
Pornography degrades women, and I am very upset when I see
my respected African brothers use it to drive traffic to their websites. I once
left an African paper I was working on because the publisher insisted on
printing an article by his wife with the headline “I had sex with my father.”
And I was ready to work on 2 other papers until I saw inappropriate content on
their websites. Pornography drives away
women, drives away conservatives, drives away liberals. Who do you have left?
I loved to read, and loved to write, but write about what? I
wanted to know things, I wanted to unlock the secrets to the universe, so I
studied science. The first day I sat in
my biochemistry class I knew the key to the universe existed, I couldn’t
believe that no-one had ever told me about the logic and symmetry that was an
amino acid. I fell in love totally and passionately with Biochemistry, which
endures to this day, 41 years later.
After I finished my PhD in Sydney in 1978, Australia was not enough
for me, so I came to the United States, to work as a post-doctoral fellow at
the University of Pennsylvania, where I happily and delightedly worked in a
physiology lab for the next 17 years, emerging in 1995 as after 5 years as an associate
professor and by then the natural mother of 4 children.
In 1998, after 3 years reading everything written by Ernest
Hemingway, taking art lessons, and swallowing whole books on writing, grammar,
publishing, and running a business, I started a business as a medical writer,
writing for mainly pharmaceutical companies.
That took me to an academic appointment as Professor of
Medical Writing, where I came under the influence of a mentor: an extraordinary
statistician, hospital administrator and strong advocate of clean food and
clean environment. I came across her in
London when I was looking for the hospital where my parents met when they were
young strong clear-eyed physicians.
Directly because of Florence Nightingale
who died in 1910, I started MJoTA with my medical writing students. After 2
years of working on MJOTA, I left my academic appointment to concentrate
full-time on MJoTA.
That was in May 2008, 4 years ago, and only now, 6 years
into publishing MJoTA, do I finally think I am understanding the audience, and
understanding what MJoTA needs to be.
I found that when I published articles on disease treatment
and prevention as beautiful full-color pdfs, no-one read them. This
didn’t bother me for some years, I was an academic for a long time remember,
but last year I had 3 homeless people living in my house for varying periods.
The first was a young Jewish girl, who was so filthy I threw her
out after a month.
The third was a gentle African American man who was a case study in the
strong relationship between lack of drive and poverty.
The second was a Senegalese man who loved climbing up trees
and cutting down branches. Wonderful. When he wasn’t doing this, he was
publishing an African news website, which he did by lifting stories from all
over the internet, and posting the stories with where they came from and a
beautiful picture, and then he was calling up advertisers to give him money and
stuff to post their ads. He was very much concerned with web traffic, and
totally contemptuous of what I was doing. Finally, he had cut down all the
branches I needed and I was sick of being sneered at so by mutual agreement, he
left.
But I had finally taken to heart something I have been
teaching my students for years: know your audience. I did not know my audience. I
thought I did but I was ignoring the obvious messages I was getting from
mediocre traffic that I saw every morning in my site statistics.
The first week I got a decent amount of traffic was when the
Kenyan Nobel Laureate Professor Wangari Maathi died, and then a week later, 2
Liberian women and a Yemeni woman were awarded Nobel Prizes. These world events gave me an
opportunity to direct readers to articles on cancer, on the environment, on
good health.
That is the tactic I am using now; publishing stories that are
interesting to African communities small or large, and adding plenty of links
to stories that are easy to read and can possibly make a difference.
Heart Disease
When I first started going to African churches, in August
2006, I went to a large Ghanaian Presbyterian church in North Philadelphia, and
then a Nigerian Pentecostal church in West Philadelphia and in Maryland, next
to Washington. I immediately noticed rows and rows of women by themselves,
greatly outnumbering the men. I figured that the husbands were at work, or
stuck in traffic, or in Nigeria.
It took me a while to realize the husbands
were dead. They were widows. Women are much more likely to be widowed in African
communities than in European communities in the United States. I know this
because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, records births and
deaths, age at death and cause of death. In the United States, the leading
cause of death is diseases of the heart. The problem is that with men of
African origin this occurs younger.
What is being done about this? African physicians and
African cardiologists are well aware of the problem, but they are not getting
buy-in from the rest of us. The most spectacular success that I know about is
the Karen Hospital in Nairobi. When you go to mjota.org, you will be directed
to stories about the Karen Hospital in the Kenyan news section.
We are all mourning Lagos plane crash victims this week, but
even if planes start dropping out of the sky frequently, Nigeria is going to
have to have total collapse of the aviation system for the number of deaths
from plane crashes to come close to the number of deaths from the diseases of
the heart resulting from high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high
cholesterol, obesity and inactivity.
I am teetering on the brink of becoming diabetic myself, and
I have since 1982 worked in the lab and written for clients a lot about
diabetes.
Diabetes is a major focus of MJoTA, with advice for how to “Dance
Diabetes Into Hell”. If you do everything that is advised, you will either not
get diabetes, reverse your diabetes, or at least slow down the progression of
diabetes that can take your feet, your eyes and make your heart stop.
Malaria
My first trip to Nigeria, in July 2007 took me by plane from
Lagos to Benin City in Edo State, and from these to Ekpoma where I was the
guest of the Vice Chancellor and the Dean of Natural Sciences for one week. The
Dean, who is a well-educated lady microbiologist, was very concerned about
endemic malaria. She took me and the Chair of Microbiology, another lady, to
the health department to see how many people had malaria that quarter.
The
health officer pulled out a huge book, told us we were in luck because the
statistician was right there, and looked at us thoughtfully and told us that
the region, with maybe 200,000 people, had only 30 cases of malaria in 3
months. That morning I had been talking with the physicians in the local
hospital who told me that at any one time, 70% of the beds in the hospital were
filled with patients with malaria. And the Dean, whose husband ran his own
hospital, told that children frequently died as they arrived at the little
hospital.
The beautifully data collected by the health officer were likely an undercalculation. But were they? Malaria is diagnosed with a microscope and a slide, if neither are available, the health officer cannot report an illness as malaria.
All I know for sure is that malaria is horrible, it kills kids, and we need to stop it.
Paperwork
I went to Kenya in 2008 on a mission to connect 100 million
dollars of angel investor funding with a women’s hospital which had caught the
eye of Michael Jordan’s mother. I spent 3 weeks there, got arrested, got
malaria, and the whole thing collapsed because the paperwork was not ready.
What we write down counts everywhere, in legal documents, in newspapers,
online. It is not there, it is not correct, and hospitals don’t get built even
when everyone wants them.
Maternal and infant mortality
I was sitting in the audience in June 2009 in Manhattan at a
Town Hall meeting called by Mr Siddique Wai, in his capacity as the leader of
the United African Conference. At the end of the meeting a young woman, his
niece Zainab, stood up and spoke about the high rate of death in child birth in
Sierra Leone. In fact, it is reported by Amnesty International and WHO to have
the world’s highest rate of death in childbirth. Zainab’s 2 grandmothers died
in childbirth, so this tragedy is not new.
I went with Zainab to Sierra Leone
to find out why.
The simple answer is poverty, but it is not correct. What is
happening is the diet is inadequate for pregnant women, it is lacking calcium,
lacking iron, high in salt, high in carbohydrate and not enough anyway. I have
been trying to draw attention to the problem, but no-one is listening, not in
Sierra Leone, not outside Sierra Leone.
We need to get rid of our notions that
what we eat is what we should eat. Every morsel of food or fluid swallowed has
the capacity to harm or nurture. Just like news.
Please go to mjota.org at every opportunity. We don’t ask
for money, we don’t ask you to read advertisements, we have none. All we ask
you to do is occasionally visit MJoTA.org, and if you talk to me by email or
text or through Facebook, I will dance!
God bless you, and I thank you for your
attention.
