Annual Stillman health fair honors late student
Stillman College had an excellent turnout for the Denzel Davis Memorial Health Fair on Tuesday. Representatives from the Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center, DCH Health System, Five Horizons Health Services, Sickle Cell Association and others were on hand to offer health screenings and guidance for finding proper health insurance.
The health fair honors Stillman student Denzel Davis, who died in 2018 after contracting viral bronchitis. He didn’t have health insurance and his illness was not caught early enough to get treatment. The annual health fair was free and open to anyone who needed to get vital health screenings. Davis’s mother Camelia Tyre attended the health fair named in her son’s honor and she was presented with a bouquet of roses to thank her for attending. She said while you never get over losing a child, having this health fair in his honor helps.
“When you lose a child, it’s unexpected, so you’re trying to find, you know, peace in in it,” Tyre said. “So I look it as this: If I can accept my son not being here, if it was to help someone else, if it was now to help educate these young people to know that your health is important just as well as your education.”
Ta’Kari Bryant is a junior at Stillman College. He said this health fair shows the school cares about its students.
“Yes, I absolutely love the attention to detail that Stillman takes,” Bryant said. “It means a lot that we would use these type of events to make sure our students are taken care of. These preventative measures are really important, because a lot of times we think because we’re so young that nothing can happen to us and we’re invincible. And it’s really important for us to make sure that we’re aware of our health, from STI testing to knowing our blood pressure rates to knowing our cholesterol, to getting genetic counseling for sickle cell. All of that’s super important as we’re becoming adults.”
More than 30 million people nationwide are without health insurance, which can lead to lack of preventative care and illnesses going untreated.
