BALANCING HEATH AND CULTURE Pacific islanders threatened by ‘diseases of modernization’

Due to the change in people’s lifestyle, Pacific islanders are now afflicted with new types of diseases, signaling a whole new relationship between culture and health, said Dr. Ronald Rubinstein, a professor of anthropology at the University of Guam.

Speaking before participants in a health symposium sponsored by First Lady’s Vision Foundation, Mr. Rubinstein called the main health threats such as cancer, hypertension, stroke, diabetes and lung ailments as “diseases of modernization.”

“These diseases largely come from the kind of lifestyle we chose to follow: how much we eat, what kind of food we eat, our daily activity patterns and how much we drink and smoke,” he said.

Exposure to health risks is a matter of choice and cultural style. Control over one’s own health today is more a matter of individual and cultural choice than perhaps any time in the past, he said.

As medical knowledge increases the people’s understanding of how health is achieved, individuals and cultures will accommodate such choices. For example, American culture has started rejecting the glamorized images of cigarettes and slowly turning away from tobacco smoking.

The major change in the history of culture and health among the people of the CNMI and other Micronesian islands took place after arrival of their European colonizers.

During this period, Chamorros and other Micronesian peoples were healthy, well-formed, physically active and strong. They have learned how to cope with the natural disasters, how to treat many common illnesses and injuries using native plants, how to extract nutritious diet from the reef and the sea. As a result, the people in the early days lived longer and had healthy lives.

Soon after the Europeans came to the islands, bringing with them new diseases for which Pacific islanders had no acquired immunity. Within the first few years after the arrival of the European colonizers, the Micronesians started getting sick due to smallpox, influenza, measles and other foreign ailments.

Local medicines and native techniques of healing were useless against the introduced infections, Mr. Rubinstein said. He noted that in Guam, as much as 90 percent of the population were afflicted with new diseases within a few short decades after contact with Europeans.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, infectious diseases continued to be the main cause of illness and death throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in the Marianas and in other islands in Micronesia.

It was only the rapid development of antibiotics such as penicillin as well as the natural resilience of Pacific islanders who developed immune protection and saved many island populations.