Some priorities. Keep in mind here that diabetes is probably the preeminent health threat of the near future, particularly from a cost perspective. Researchers predict that one in three kids born in 2000 will contract Type 2 diabetes. The disease currently costs $132 billion in productivity yearly and we spend $1.2 billion on research to cure and contain it:
In Worcester, Mass., scientists are boxing up their test tubes at a shuttered laboratory where just two years ago they isolated a chemical that triggers diabetes.
In Oklahoma City, health workers faced with soaring rates of Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, question whethaer they can afford to continue to offer classes where diabetics learn how to avoid foot amputations.
In Columbia, S.C., diabetes educators say they need more money to expand a program that uses the pulpit in black churches to preach the importance of a healthy diet and exercise.
Across the country, health care officials who rely on federal money to help stem the growing epidemic of Type 2 diabetes say they have become increasingly frustrated and alarmed.
Diabetes is the only major disease with a death rate that is still rising — up 22 percent since 1990 — and it has emerged as the leading cause of kidney failure, blindness and nontraumatic amputation.
But public health experts say federal spending on the disease has historically fallen short of what is needed. And now the government has cut diabetes funds in the budgets for this year and next, despite the explosive growth of a disease that now figures in the deaths of 225,000 Americans each year.
Words -- even snarky ones -- fail me.
