Here's a link to the Times' special report.
Blogcritics sponsored "Blogging For A Cure" last year (thanks again, Eric), which involved quite a few of the Web's most superior bloggers posting articles about diabetes (both type 1 and type 2 diabetes) all throughout the month of November, American Diabetes Month.
I do think the Times should've included someone with type 1 diabetes in the article (other than myself), since the numbers they used of those who have diabetes include both type 1 and type 2 diabetics (perhaps they did include someone in the print edition, but the webmaster took them out of the Internet edition article?) - the numbers weren't broken down into how many have type 1 and how many have type 2. Type 1 diabetics will naturally read the article, but likely won't get as much out of it, as they aren't represented (at least in the Web edition's version).
I do appreciate the special report being published, as it does raise awareness of diabetes, which I strongly support. Awareness is very important, especially since diabetes often is a silent killer. However, what's more important is that the silent killer is stopped before it can harm anyone else or take another life. That's why we need to cure diabetes. As I told a Congressional subcommittee in April 2000 (this was taken from a Congressional subcommittee report):
According to studies, some 15 years will be robbed from my life because of it. Diabetes is a growing plague negatively affecting our Nation. Already the CDC calls diabetes the epic of our time. And the number of people with diabetes is expected to double between 1995 and 2025.
In Ronald Reagan's inaugural address he said, "Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem." And when Government fails to do what is needed to find a cure for this disease, it is not part of the solution but part of the problem. Spending Federal tax dollars on medical research is a legitimate function of our Government. But Congress must provide careful oversight to secure that these monies are spent appropriately. The price of letting NIH bureaucrats allocate scarce research dollars to diseases that have a lesser impact on the health of our Nation and to ignore their own stated allocated criteria is part of the problem.
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