I consider myself reasonably well read and passably well-informed. I try to keep up with what is going on. I believe one of the surest defences of democracy is a citizenry which cannot easily be fooled since it keeps up to date with events and developments.
So I find myself a little bemused and embarrassed to realize how ignorant I am of a multitude of things which suddenly come to my attention almost on a daily basis. Out of many here are three items which I should have known about but didn’t.
- In common with all Guyanese I have been appalled at this nation’s top ranking in the World Health Organisation’s suicide index. In 2012 there were 44.2 suicides per 100,000 population in Guyana with North Korea, of all benighted places, a distant second at 38 suicides per 100,000 population. The world average is 11.4 suicides per 100,000. Can it be that the curse of Jonestown still haunts us?
However, I did not know that it is thought that our high incidence of suicides might be partly due to chemistry. Professor Gerard Hutchinson, a psychiatrist who heads the department of clinical medical sciences at the St. Augustine campus of UWI, has noted that Guyanese agricultural workers and farmers may be overusing organophosphate herbicides and insecticides which