Growing Presence of Diabetes Among Students in the USA
As the number of students with diabetes in the USA continues to rise, experts predict that by 2060, more than half a million children will have this chronic health disorder. This means that educators and school health staff will increasingly need to provide monitoring and medical assistance throughout the day.
In the past five years, regions from Connecticut to California and Tennessee to Texas have faced Department of Justice investigations for not properly managing students’ diabetes during and after school. Dr. Henry Rodriguez, a pediatric endocrinologist and co-chairman of the American Diabetes Association’s Safe at School Working Group, emphasized the critical importance of educators, physicians, and families working together to manage students’ diabetes. Rodriguez mentioned that as doctors, they might see a patient for 30 to 40 minutes up to three or four times a year, but “the school nurse and teachers see the children many times throughout the school day, all year long, and we rely heavily on their observations.”
If the rate of diabetes among students in America continues to increase as rapidly as it did from 2002 to 2017, statistics suggest that by 2060, there will be 526,000 people under the age of 20 with diabetes. This represents a 65% increase in type 1 diabetes and an almost eightfold surge in type 2 diabetes.
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