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could join the fight against the outbreak and its impact on societies. We should step up our efforts to send food and supplies to affected communities and support organizations that provide services to those who have lost their loved ones, especially orphaned children.
Finally, the health of people and communities is a product of social determinants. Just as the rise of a more complex Post-Traumatic Stress Didsorder in black communities can be explained by certain policies and practices here at home, we can similarly explain the rise of deadly pathogens abroad. Deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola and HIV have emerged in African nations due to certain policies that have undermined their health care systems and public health infrastructure. Historically, these policies include the brutal European colonization of African nations, the extraction of African resources and minerals by corporations after independence, and the financial conditions on loans by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
These policies and practices have spawned corruption, fostered civil wars, and engendered a lack of investment in health care and public health infrastructure. Firestone and the Warlord, a newly released documentary, graphically illustrates how American colonization, the Firestone rubber plantation, the rule of Amerio-Liberians, and the sickening brutality of warlords deploying child soldiers help further explain the conditions by which Ebola could emerge in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
To defeat the Ebola epidemic, we need to deal with the history that illustrates how we need to invest our own public health care systems and infrastructure, based on ethical science and medicine, to address our need for health and wellness. At Morgan State University and other HBCUs, we can train and develop a cadre of public health leaders, nurses, nutritionists, health educators, and scientists that can rise to this challenge and change the social determinants of health to produce a more empowered, healthy, and whole African people.
"To defeat the Ebola epidemic, we need to deal with the history that illustrates how we need to invest our own health care systems and infrastructure, based on ethical science snf medicine, to address our need for health and wholeness. At Morgan State University and other HBCUs, we can train and develop a cadre of public health leaders, nurses, nutritionists, health educators, and scientists that can rise to this challenge and change the social determinants of health to produce a more empowered, healthy, and whole African people."