My name is Hanna Orlowski and I'm the director of the Diabetes Care Center at Phoebe Putney and I was going to tell you a little about diabetes.

Diabetes is, as you all many know, is becoming an epidemic. It's a very scary thing that's happening right now.

As far as health care, one out of every ten dollars is spent as attributed to diabetes. The indirect costs of this are increase in absenteeism, decrease in productivity, and unfortunately, an increase is early mortality. So, those who are well trained end up getting all the complications, you know, the people that are in the industry that have all the seniority that are end up having an early mortality and lots of complications.

Right now, diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death and the number one leading cause in blindness, kidney disease and non‑traumatic amputations.

One of the things that industries could do to help reduce their costs is by early prevention. I think that it would be great if we could have educators actually go into facilities and start teaching them about pre‑diabetes, patients who already have diabetes, people who have been diagnosed with hypertension or cholesterol because educators could go in and actually teach them on the forefront.

You have a high risk, your family history has a very strong history of cholesterol and hypertension problems, and we could actually get those problems under control before they start having the complications. Obesity is huge. Obesity and physical activity are the number one reasons, two reasons actually, why diabetes is so prevalent now.

One of the things that Phoebe could do actually to help industries are they could actually go in and actually have the educators go in and teach them about a preventative. How can we prevent you from having diabetes? There are lots of strong links that you can take little post tests or tests that say if you have “X‑X‑X,” then your chances of you developing diabetes are very high.

Also, many of those folks already have hypertension, already are overweight and we don't want to move them from the overweight category to the obese category. We want to prevent them from those little small changes of not letting them become obese or morbidly obese will significantly decrease the dollars that are spent in health care.

It will help them have a better work force because the work force, if you are tired or if you take longer lunch breaks, if you are not exercising in your home life, we absolutely know that exercise or physical activity helps decrease stress in your life.

Those are the kind of things that we could actually teach them how to do. We have plenty of staff that could go out and actually nurses that can go out and teach them ways to get their blood sugars under control. We know that if their A1C is under a certain level, they will not have the complications. You can actually delay all of these complications with diabetes if you have an A1C that is accurate.

A staggering statistic to me is that diabetes, people who have diabetes, one in four should be on insulin. One of the most staggering statistics to me is that people who have type two diabetes should be taking an average of four shots a day and in the United States they are only taking an average of 1.7 shots a day.

We kind of have a delay in the amount of people starting on insulin versus just starting on oral medications. And, if we would just start them earlier on insulin, it can postpone a lot of these complications that could occur.

If anybody has any questions, they can actually always call our Diabetes Care Center. We have four educators there and two dieticians. And, the number is 312‑1392.