Parallels between stigma and isolation throughout the COVID-19 pandemic have been underneath the highlight throughout the fifth annual Robben Island Memorial Lecture in Cape City on Sunday.
Leprosy was one of many illnesses that have been highlighted as probably the most devastating to mankind. The world’s well-known island was as soon as a leper colony, the place these with the illness have been banished to.
The museum has honoured the historical past and heritage of the sufferers who have been exiled to the island.
Greatest often called the previous jail which housed a few of South Africa’s most iconic freedom fighters. The island, nonetheless, additionally has a multi-layered medical historical past of banishment, exile and stigma. It was, for a lot of many years, a spot to which society’s outcasts have been banished.
Amongst these are sufferers who suffered from psychological well being points and leprosy. The stigma round persistent pores and skin illness dates again to historical occasions, and all through the course of historical past, these affected have been ostracised.
The museum says, equally to the latest COVID-19 pandemic, schooling is essential to creating an inclusive and equal society.
The Chairperson of the Robben Island Museum Council Professor Saths Cooper says the youth must be taken care of and supported in each manner in order that they don’t face the identical challenges of the previous.
“We must be wanting ahead and what we aren’t doing helps our youngsters, our younger individuals who represent the overwhelming majority of our inhabitants to beat the difficulties that not solely Covid however many years of neglect have created in our society. We have to spend money on them in order that they don’t confront the issues that we confronted prior to now. COVID-19, racism, apartheid, leprosy any tendency to make folks really feel they’re inferior,” Cooper explains.
Medical college students attending the lecture additionally weighed in on the significance of schooling and consciousness with a purpose to break stigmas that include the lack of know-how or understanding.
Caitlin Sithole, who’s a medical scholar, says a very powerful factor is schooling. Sithole says a greater understanding of a pandemic makes it a lot simpler to take care of it.
“I believe breaking stigma begins with schooling. I believe the stigma relies on uncertainty and never realizing, it begins with educating someone in order that they know extra and so they realise that one thing that they thought was one factor, ostracised doesn’t should be that manner. One thing so simple as leprosy, it’s not contagious in the identical manner we thought it was so it’s taking that schooling and main it to one thing else, making folks realise that our stigma isn’t based in one thing and it’s only after we break that barrier will we have the ability to transfer away from ostracising folks,” explains Sithole.
One other medical scholar, Sibande Mbano says the medical subject does extra than simply deal with illnesses which were found.
“I believe it’s fairly necessary to notice that the rebranding of COVID-19 or any pandemic or illness that impacts humanity negatively, medical intervention begins far earlier than the overall populace turns into conscious of it. It comes from folks themselves that determine to tackle the duty of attempting to get info on this so we will attempt to stop tragedy, which is the aim of the medical occupation. Its affect and the work that’s accomplished span far past the remedy that society is conscious of. We proceed to analysis, creating different medication or different strategies of not solely remedy but in addition prevention,” Mbano particulars.
Robben Island Museum says it’s dedicated to working in opposition to stigmatisation and ostracisation of any individual or folks in society.
