Anecdotal evidence over the last few years shows a significant increase in the number of deaths among fairly young and middle-aged persons in Anguilla – deaths that were not the result of accidents, but were still unexpected and due to medical issues.
When you live off island and examine the number of deaths in the immediate environment in which you live and work, you seldom ever hear of people dying at such an alarming rate as you hear about in Anguilla.
In talking about this to some Anguillians who are living overseas. They say that they know very, very few people within their own work space who have relatives or friends that are dying. But here in Anguilla, not a month passes without someone dying who is connected to your circle of relatives, friends, acquaintances or co-workers. That speaks volumes about what is really happening in our small community.
We know what is causing most of these deaths – a wide range of cancers, issues of diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension and stroke. We also know that a common cause of a number of these deaths is a lack of early detection of symptoms of disease that result in death. This is likely due to persons inability to afford preventive care services, and only access or seek medical care when the symptoms become chronic. If the symptoms were detected early, some of these deaths could very well be prevented or delayed for many years.
If we drill down further, and try to understand some of the possible underlying causes of why our people succumb to these non-communicable diseases, we might notice issues of poor nutrition, use and abuse of alcohol and illegal drugs, as well as high levels of stress.
The government that we have in power today, under the leadership of a medical doctor, promised us going in to the election that health was going to be a high priority – and that this government would address the health challenges confronting our island locally, so that persons would not have to go overseas to seek medical treatment for symptoms and illnesses that could easily be treated in Anguilla.
Here we are, almost two and a half years into this administration, and anecdotally, it would appear as though the number of deaths has risen since the medical doctor was elected to office.
We know that there are some obvious contributing factors to some of the health challenges that we have in Anguilla, and most notably among them is the issue of stress. One could argue that we had the issue of the global economic challenges which led to the failure of our two indigenous banks, followed by the devastation caused by Hurricane Irma, and before we could fully recover from Hurricane Irma, we had the issues of COVID.
Most recently, we had the onset of inflation, some of which was brought on by the war between Russia and Ukraine. Persons in Anguilla have been under an enormous amount of physical, emotional and financial stress where many of them have exhausted their reserved savings just trying to survive during this period of uncertainty. This is something that clearly needs looking into.
One of the things that is also worth noting is that when people are challenged financially, they tend to engage in food substitution where they buy cheaper foods that are often of low quality and of little nutritional value.
Our current Premier is well-positioned to have this looked into, so that the data can be closely analysed and a primary care system can be implemented to better understand how to engage in early detection, diagnosis and treatment. If it is that our people need to improve their nutrition, then let’s address it. But clearly there is a lot of sickness, disease, death, and sudden death, among relatively young people, due to stress and nutrition factors.
There is a need for the issue of mortality to be given some urgent attention. Everybody in Anguilla is talking about it but nothing appears to be done about it. Meanwhile, many of these health issues are leading to a steady rise in mortality among relatively healthy-looking young people.
There is an appeal for the health system to do some investigating and see what can be done to help to save the lives of our people – our younger folks in particular. With all the stressful issues that constantly bombard us here in Anguilla – cost of living, social decline, conflict, etc – Government of Anguilla please, let’s focus on the health and well-being of our citizens as a matter of urgency.
– Contributed
