Panel: Lessons Can Lessen Health Troubles : Meeting: At a black health issues forum, participants agree teaching self-esteem can help remedy problems.

Fostering self-esteem and purpose within Orange County’s youngest blacks will cure many of the health problems that are threatening the very survival of that population, the county’s top health official said Thursday.

“We have met the enemy and they is us,” said Dr. Hugh F. Stallworth, Orange County’s new public health officer, quoting the comic strip character Pogo.

Stallworth and other speakers at the county’s first conference focusing on black health issues contended that blacks, by teaching their children values such as self-reliance and respect for others, can go far to curb the high rates of infant mortality, homicide, child abuse and HIV.

“We engage in an extraordinary rate of self-destructive behavior,” Stallworth told the group, which included numerous black social workers and physicians.

Rick Greenwood, Orange County’s deputy director of public health, said about 120 people attended the conference, twice as many as expected.

The daylong event was arranged by the Orange County Health Care Agency with help from several black organizations, including the Black Chamber of Commerce. Health officials said they intend to hold another such conference next year.

He said the dual objective of Thursday’s conference was to highlight the health concerns of blacks, such as their higher susceptibility to diabetes, and to unify the county’s widely scattered black population, which numbers less than 50,000.

A recurrent theme of the conference was the need to teach more effective parenting skills. Blacks have an extraordinarily high number of child deaths caused by physical abuse, the speakers said.

Sandra Guine, child abuse consultant for Los Angeles County Public Health Department, said the violence was spawned in the era of slavery when parents learned to train their children “with a whip,” just as they were trained by their masters.

Guine said black adults who were themselves abused as children must learn “there is nothing wrong with loving a child and having a spoiled child.”

Ralph Dawson, director of the Center for the Study of Black-on-Black Crime at the Cal State Los Angeles, said, “Communication is the key to good discipline.”

In addition to this conference, Greenwood said county health officials will be working with each of the county’s various ethnic groups in an effort to generate grass-roots support for addressing each group’s distinct health problems.