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Caption: Vannessa Rushing gets
tested for diabetes at HUH Diabetes Treatment Center
While getting tested for
diabetes is smart preventative medicine for everyone, it has a much deeper
meaning for Vanessa Rushing.
“My great grandmother, my
grandmother, my mother and three of my mother’s sisters all died from diabetes,”
Rushing, 44, said.
 So,
when the Howard University Hospital Diabetes
Treatment Center Mobile Unit
came to the CVS/pharmacy where Rushing works in northeast Washington, D.C., she
was one of the first in line to be tested.
Rushing is one of hundreds
of people being tested across Washington, D.C., from June through September by
the Diabetes Treatment Center Mobile Unit under a generous grant from the
District of Columbia Department of Health to test and treat underserved
residents in five of the city’s eight wards for diabetes.
Gail Nunlee-Bland, M.D.,
director of the Diabetes Treatment Center, said she and her staff decided on
using large mobile unit because they felt they could reach more people by going
out into the community.
 “It
allows us to see the breath of the severity of the disease by looking at various
neighborhoods to see who is at risk, how they are being treated and whether they
are being treated,” she said.
Such outreach is
particularly needed among African Americans, Dr. Nunlee-Bland said.
“As we look at statistics,
we see that 13.3 percent of African-Americans have diabetes compared to 8
percent for the general population,” she said, “and African “Americans and
Hispanics have higher rates of complications from diabetes, like blindness,
amputation, kidney disease, and these can be prevented. We’d like to reduce
those complications, and we’d like to catch the problem early enough to keep the
person from developing diabetes.”
The need for such screenings
and treatment has been apparent. Patients’ glucose levels have been so high in
some cases that they had to be sent immediately to the emergency room. In one
case, a person’s blood sugar level was so elevated that it wouldn’t register on
the testing equipment.
The Diabetes Treatment
Center will apply to renew the grant for October. The staff initially had hoped
to screen about 250 people, at the current rate, is expected to have tested more
than 1,000 by the end of September.
“It’s been an eye-opener,”
Dr. Nunlee-Bland said. “We’ve definitely exceeded our target.”
Rushing, fortunately, tested
negative for diabetes, but she said she’s glad she checked, and she plans
checking every year.
“I did it for me,” she said,
“but I also did it for the three generations of women I’ve lost to diabetes. I
think they would want me to do it.”
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