Happy November! Welcome to the homestretch of 2008 – where everyone begins and finalizes plans for the holidays and traveling across country gets everyone a little stressed out.
I wanted to bring to your attention that this month is National Diabetes Awareness Month and there are a few reasons why I’m happy to bring this to your attention. First of all, if you have been following health related news you would have heard that as recently as yesterday, the CDC came out with a report on research they did showing the continuing rise of diabetes cases in America. We’re not in good shape (pardon the pun) as a nation when it comes to this disease, folks. The report highlights the obesity problem in the U.S. as the leading source for the new cases of Type 2 diabetes.
From the AP article:
In Type 2 diabetes, cells do not properly use insulin, a hormone needed to convert sugar into energy, and the pancreas gradually loses its ability to produce it. The illness can cause sugar to build up in the body, leading to complications such as heart disease, blindness, kidney failure and poor circulation that leads to foot amputations.
In other words, we need to be doing as much as possible to create effective health campaigns that educate and communicate preventive actions so we can tackle this thing. One of the things I’m excited about living in this new media landscape is that we have people creating community and helping people suffering with the disease. Two great resources would be Amy Tenderich’s DiabetesMine (who at the beginning of the year was featured in mainstream news) and DLife, which is pretty much the WebMD of diabetes. Also, make sure and check out my colleague Amy Jussel’s post on Health 2.0 innovations currently going on that focus on diabetes. Amy is a great mentor of mine who focuses on how media impacts the behavioral health of youth at her non profit, Shaping Youth.
The focal point has been the South, which has been continually shown to have the highest incidences of individuals who are overweight and obese and this recent report shows that the area has the highest levels of diabetes cases. Is this a place where we can successfully target health education campaigns? What would help to increase adoption rates of healthier behaviors in this area?
Throughout the month of November, I urge you to inform those in your circle about the dangers of developing diabetes and help them learn about more ways to eat better and increase physical activity.
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Oh! One more good link for you along these lines…WebMd did a story on the Escape from Diab game (our Playnormous friends, when we were at the session w/the ArchImage fellow, Richard speaking)
Here’s the piece, from the nutrition side via Baylor/Houston docs:
http://children.webmd.com/news/20081027/video-games-zap-kids-diabetes-risk?src=RSS_PUBLIC
Andre, the DLife.com teen videos and teen TV clips really drive the point home about youth diabetes and do a good job ‘debunking’ some of the ‘obesity only’ myths accompanying the disease.
Also, just to give you a feel for the complexity and interconnectedness of the many layers of human behavioral motivation/need hierarchies and such pertaining to health in this realm check out this visual insight using the ‘obesity system influence diagram’ —Yowza. That puppy’s goin’ on my Facebook page! Amazing linkage btwn. body and brain:
http://www.shiftn.com/obesity/Full-Map.html
Great to see you…hope to start getting my Health 2.0 posts up next and see if I can snag that Health-games report from Gaming4Health too. Doug said it would release ‘soon after the show’ so ping me if you get it first, ‘k?
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