I just got around to reading a NYT article that Joanna posted yesterday: N. R. Kleinfield, "Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis," <http://nytimes.com/2006/01/09/nyregion/ nyregionspecial5/09diabetes.html>.
Highlights:
"An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers - more than one in every eight - now have diabetes. . . ."
"As many war veterans lost lower limbs last year to the disease as American soldiers did to combat injuries in the entire Vietnam War. Diabetes is the principal reason adults go blind."
"According to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, some 70 percent of lower-limb amputations in 2003 were performed on diabetics."
"Nearly 21 million Americans are believed to be diabetic, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and 41 million more are prediabetic; their blood sugar is high, and could reach the diabetic level if they do not alter their living habits."
"In 2003, diabetes vaulted past stroke and AIDS from the sixth- leading cause of death in New York to the fourth. It was fifth, slightly behind stroke, in 2004. But the health department says it believes the actual toll is much worse because doctors who fill out death certificates may ascribe the death to a complication rather than to the diabetes at its root. Lorna Thorpe, deputy health commissioner, combed through medical charts and concluded that diabetes should be third, trailing cardiovascular disease and cancer."
"One in three children born in the United States five years ago are expected to become diabetic in their lifetimes, according to a projection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The forecast is even bleaker for Latinos: one in every two."
Individual choice is unlikely to solve the problem of diabetes, even though its prevention and management is more under individual control than the level of fossil fuel consumption is. The government has to cut subsidies to corn, regulate portions (of meals served at restaurants and ready-to-eat foods and beverages sold at supermarkets and convenience stores), establish 32-hour workweeks (so workers have time to exercise), and/or redistribute wealth (the more income the poor get and the narrower the income/wealth gap, the healthier the majority).
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>