COMMON ENDEMIC NORMALCY (CEN)

Imagine yourself as a tourist, visiting a particular country of interest. In one of the numerous cities of this country, you observe that one in five people have facial bumps, two in ten people are either limping or using crutches, lip malformations and cleft palates have an incidence rate of about 9 in 100.

This city has a museum, a water spring, a river fall, 2 rocks and 3 hills. While visiting these tourist sites, the tourist attendant kept mixing colors up. To your dismay, it slips that such a condition is revealing of a normal state of health here, as a man who is not color blind is not a son of the soil.

He tells you, as a matter of fact, that facial bumping is the critical sign that shows who has come of age and who hasn’t, that road traffic accidents were the norm of the day and almost every mature adult had experienced at least one fatal one before.

Oh…as for the lip and cleft malformations? “You see, this has been the tradition passed from our fathers. It is an honor to have someone like that in a family because the gods send those children as guardians over the community”!

Leaving that city/country, I’m assuming you’d experience something of this nature: You’d probably be full of thanks, you might almost burst with thankfulness that you do not belong to that community.

However, does the fact that it seems pretty normal over there make it actually normal?

Or does it make it endemic?

Or maybe endemically normal?

Whichever way we choose to view such a situation presenting itself to us, it is paramount to note that what has become normal to an individual is not necessarily healthy. It could even be endemic.

Could your normal state be marked as healthy, or would it be marked as endemic?