>>do you know
>>any directly african people? most
>>first generation african immigrants that
>>i knwo have never been
>>sick and have never gone
>>to a doctor
>
>Even positive generalisations are dangerous things...
>

from what i have seen, people who grow up away from the modern medicine that the western world is so proud of have no need for the medicine. in some cases there are indigenous medicines and indigenous treatments. but i never would have imagined that human beings could look as healthy as the people i saw in the jungle... but i had to get a million vaccines (that's is very definately an exxaggeration) in order to go, and for my western body the jungle was chock full of health hazards beyond my wildest imagination.

for example, western people can't go barefoot in tropical jungle because of worms and parasites. but every indigenous (please do not picture naked tribal people here-indigenous means native to the area-- all kinds of people can be native to an area) person in the jungle was barefoot and laughing at our shoes. sometimes tourists do take off their shoes, and most of the time they end up getting very sick.

think of the difference between a mister-cleaned kitchen in the west vs. teh fruits you get on the street in developing countries and bite right into (think guinnep).

some people are very very very worried about germs, and oftentimes they are sickly ones. cause and effect are, i believe, interchangeable here.

my statement was a generalization, but i stand by it, as a generalization. and i hope to hell that we all know well enough to recognize a generalization when we see one and acknowledge that of course there are so many individual differences within it.