Jennifer Deanne Ford

Albinism in Two Islands of the Caribbean: Knowledge of and Attitude Towards Albinism Jennifer Deanne Ford

The idea for this project was born out of a desire to document a real life experience within my family and is designed to raise awareness to the condition of albinism and impart and expose new knowledge about albinism and the related Hermansky Pudlak Syndrome. In the first ten years of my life all I knew was that two of my three my siblings had a lighter skin complexion than other members of the family. They had very poor eyesight and were prone to sunburn easily. Occasionally, they both had nosebleeds, which to a West Indian were attributed to the long periods spent in the sun. It was as a teenager I realised that my siblings were persons with albinism. In 1996 after about nine months of sudden unusual medical occurrences my brother, George Jnr, died at age 37. What a turmoil our family was thrown into to discover that he was among some 200 plus persons with Type 4 albinism who had some specific gene, which initiates all these medical complications that eventually caused his death. Sadly five years later in 2001, the family suffered the lost of my other sibling, Marlene, at age 50.