From USA Today:

Medical experts say media coverage of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor demonstrates some widely held public misperceptions about diabetes. Among the most common myths: that people with diabetes are too sickly to work, have difficulty managing their medications, and should not be able to reproduce.

“From my personal experience, having lived an awfully long time with diabetes, I’ve certainly had my share of ignorant remarks made,” says Ann Albright, 50, director of the Division of Diabetes Translation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has had type 1 diabetes since she was 9.

“People say ignorant things because they don’t really understand the disease,” she says.

The experts were gathered for the American Diabetes Association’s 69th Annual Scientific Sessions in New Orleans.

See also: Meeting the challenge of diabetes — Sara Sklaroff in the Washington Post

When President Obama announced his nominee for the Supreme Court last week, he trumpeted her childhood diagnosis of diabetes as one of the challenges she’d overcome. Sonia Sotomayor’s success is a testament to how extraordinary life with diabetes can be. Yes, this is a serious disease, without a cure, but it is also very treatable.

… Highly motivated people like Sotomayor do particularly well with the self-management tasks of diabetes. She is also lucky enough to have health insurance, given that diabetes can be expensive to treat and requires access to good medical care.

Earlier posts here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 6:16 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, Obama administration, diabetes, public attitudes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post