Declare War on Diabetes

A four-part series in The New York Times offered grim insights into the incurable disease diabetes. Ignore it, and it can lead to heart disease, strokes, amputations and shortened lives. It is the leading cause of blindness. Most of those who have diabetes have Type 2, in which obesity and poverty are key contributors, especially among blacks and Hispanics, who are disproportionately stricken in the United States. It is not uncommon in poor and minority communities, the worst hit, to see amputees in wheelchairs.

The neighborhoods where diabetes runs rampant are almost always short on parks for exercise and have schools that rarely conduct gym classes. Fast food restaurants abound; healthy food is often expensive or unavailable, and bad diet choices are readily at hand. Diabetes is a disease defined by economic disparity. In heavily Hispanic East Harlem in Manhattan, the illness plagues 14 percent of the population; just to the south, across 96th Street on the more affluent Upper East Side of New York City, the rate is under 2 percent.

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