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What happened in 2006 that impacted the health of Latino children in Colorado?

Last week I read a report about a presentation done by three medical researchers from Colorado who detected a significant increase in recent years of the rates of diabetic ketoacidosis in children with type 1 diabetes living in Colorado.

According to Medline Plus -a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine-, diabetic ketoacidosis is “a complication of diabetes that occurs when the body cannot use sugar (glucose) as a fuel source because the body has no insulin or not enough insulin, and fat is used instead. Byproducts of fat breakdown, called ketones, build up in the body.”

The researcher, lead by Dr. Arleta Rewers of the School of Medicine at the University of Colorado in Denver, detected that the rate of diabetic ketoacidosis from 2006 to 2009 was higher than the rate reported from 1978 to 1982 (41 percent vs. 38 percent). In addition, from 2006 to 2009, the proportion of Hispanic children more than doubled.

According to Rewers, it is of great concern to discover that the rates of diabetic ketoacidosis in Colorado children, “previously declining, have returned to the1980's level and are now twice as high as those in Europe.”

That’s why Rewers talks about an “apparent epidemic” of diabetic ketoacidosis, that perhaps began in 2006 and it is explained in part by “an increased number of patients who were uninsured and Hispanic.”

What happened in 2006 in Colorado that could have had a negative impact on the health of Latino children from low-income, immigrant families?

As far as I know, Rewers never mentions the issue. But I don’t think it is a coincidence that 2006 both the year when the Colorado legislature approved a package of immigration laws and the year of the beginning of the recent diabetes epidemic.

In 2006, Colorado legislators wanted to prevent the use of public funds to benefit undocumented immigrants. For that reason, they approved laws requiring the verification of immigration status of those asking for public services. The laws were so complicated they have changed several times.

Whatever the case, at that time I wrote and I read several stories about how the 2006 Colorado laws prevented (and are still preventing) citizens and legal citizens from accessing health services and other services.

Perhaps, then, it is not just by chance that an “apparent epidemic” of diabetic complications begins precisely the same year when access to health care services is denied to certain children because of the suspicious legal situation of their parents.

I realize that because an event happens after another one doesn’t mean the first is the cause of the second one. However, I can’t separate the 2006 laws from the 2006 epidemic.

Those laws caused more expenses that the money they were trying to save and it seems they also caused an epidemic of diabetic complications among innocent children unconnected to any political ideology.

How many more years will pass before we realize the unwanted consequences of the laws now implemented in Arizona and soon in other states

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