Caribbean trade bloc governments have been so worried about the stark increase in chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension among citizens that they have twice organized special summits to address the issue and even pushed the United Nations into holding a high-level meeting to find ways of reducing these numbers.
In the past week, a respected Caribbean academic has sought to directly link what he calls the “epidemic” of chronic, non-communicable diseases in the Afro-Caribbean community to the history of violently removing Africans from the continent to work as slaves in the Caribbean and Americas.