I literally cannot watch television, listen to the news in my car or open my laptop computer screen that the “Swine Flu” isn’t getting 95% of all coverage.  I’m 59 years old and was my son Evan’s age when the first Swine Flu scare came about back in 1976. I recall thinking what hype it was and learned about 8 months later that my recollections were accurate.  Worse, we learned that Swine Flu vaccines, rushed to the market in 1976, were injurious.  What has changed?

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Although I have no statistics to prove this, if I were a betting man, I’d wager a handsome sum that Pediatric Allergists’ offices are deluged with patients in September each year. I’ve known many allergists throughout my career and, unlike other physicians, they really do try to locate “the cause” of their patients’ maladies. Even if I believe that implicating a simple plant like ragweed is erroneous….give them credit, they are trying. It is likely that every September, tens of thousands of parents rush their sniffling children into an allergist’s office. But why September, and why all of the sudden is this child allergic to ragweed?

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WELCOME to the September 2009 issue of our popular newsletter, KNOW THIS!
By Doug Kaufmann

Off to school they go! How I remember the sinking feeling that Ruth and I had as we drove our boys to school on opening day each year. The media, of course, popularizes the joy that parents should feel as each new school year begins, but we never knew that joy and I’m glad we didn’t.

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The Urban Dictionary defines the word “bêtes” as what you call a person with diabetes without having to say the whole word.  My grandmother and an uncle both died of bêtes and they were not alone. As a matter of fact, according to The International Diabetes Federation, every 10 seconds, diabetes and the related disorders of this disease, kills another person…every ten seconds!

The statistics are staggering. Diabetes currently affects 246 million people worldwide (costs about $232 billion) and is expected to affect 380 million people by 2025 (costs expected to be about $303 billion). I could continue, but you get the point! It is my hope that after reading this issue, you will better understand your role in preventing this dreaded disease. 

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As Dr. Jennings alludes to in her article this month, we made the decision late in the month to gear this newsletter toward yet another in a growing number (all of them) of mysterious autoimmune diseases to wit the scientific literature professes, “the cause is unknown.”

Marketing of this particular autoimmune disease is interesting to me, because using the same breath as they do to apprise we, the people, that “the cause is unknown,” they continue to actively promote getting to a doctor to get it diagnosed! If I didn’t know that air fills my tires, would I not be using water to fill them? How do you accurately diagnose any disease if you don’t know what causes it? And therein lies what Kyle Drew, Dr. Lynn Jennings and I ask throughout the August 2009 issue of KNOW THIS.

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