Resettlement doesn’t help Marshall Islanders recover from poverty
The sixth installment of “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?” will be shown at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 6, in the Levin Hall Auditorium, 11th and Market streets, at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. The award-winning series of seven documentaries explores how social conditions affect health.
Two billion people worldwide are infected with the TB bacillus, but only 9 million people a year actually get the disease. “Collateral Damage,” the story of the Marshall Islands, can help us understand why. The lives and health of Marshall Islanders in the equatorial Pacific were disrupted in a unique fashion when the United States occupied their nation and used their outer islands for extensive nuclear testing after World War II. Between 1946 and 1958, 67 atomic devices were detonated — the estimated yield equivalent to 1.7 Hiroshima blasts every day for 12 years. After miscalculations on one of the largest explosions caused fallout to land on three inhabited islands, residents were treated, relocated and tracked to study the effects of radiation exposure on humans. Their lands, culture, and traditional way of life destroyed, many Marshallese now crowd the island of Ebeye hoping to get a job at the U.S. base on nearby Kwajalein. Here, they face the worst of both the “developing” and industrialized worlds. Moderator is Jason Glenn, a member of the faculty at UTMB’s Institute for the Medical Humanities.
“Unnatural Causes” concludes on May 13 with “Not Just a Paycheck.” The documentaries are free and open to the public.