In Florida in 2014, police stopped the driver of a swerving pickup truck and eventually cuffed him when he resisted and became combative. Too late they determined that the man wasn’t drunk but rather diabetic. His blood glucose had dropped to 29 mg/dL. He stopped breathing, was revived, but was pronounced dead at the hospital.
That’s one of many similar stories, some of which led to heartbreak for families and heavy penalties for municipalities for the way their police handled the situation.
Not long ago the American Diabetes Association was lamenting that diabetes training for officers was dwindling instead of growing at the very time the disease was on the march, its numbers booming. Dr. Jordan Pinsker at Sansum Diabetes Center in Santa Barbara recently provided me with these stats: “Almost 30 million U.S. children and adults have type 1 or 2 diabetes. That’s 9.3 percent of the population, making it the most prevalent disease in the country. If trends continue, as many as one in three will have diabetes by 2050.”
