Summit calls for education campaign for diabetic blacks

Participants at a Diabetes Summit in Baltimore have called for a school and church campaign to educate African-Americans about the dangers of diabetes, which affects blacks at twice the rate of whites and for whom serious complications are ten times more likely to occur.

“We have to make diabetes control the new civil rights movement,” said Dr. Walter Johnson of the American Diabetes Association. “If you make it a civil rights movement, everybody buys in.”

According to summit experts, African-Americans are seventeen percent more likely to develop gangrene as a result of diabetes-related circulation problems, and are thirty percent more likely to have a limb amputated.

“Although we know that control of risk factors is very, very important, in fact, risk factors are not very well managed,” said Dr. Alafia Samuels, a clinical director with Care Improvement Plus.

Dr. Samuels said that half of new diabetes patients stop taking insulin-controlling medicines within six months. The educational campaign is needed, she said, to help patients develop healthy habits.

(Via Examiner.com)