My daughter was diagosed in 1997 at age 5. Several months later, our next door neighbor's 13 year old son was diagnosed. Within the year, our backyard neighbor's 3 year old was diagnosed. Any environmental factors going on here???
hey, check out my posts because i asked a similar question and got some VERY good responses.
Mandie - there was some very good discussion there... In case anyone else is as lazy as I am, I'm posting the link: http://juvenation.org/forums/t/641.aspx
Thanks!
A-D
That is strange. While I was pregnant, I lost 38 lbs. All caught back up to me , but... I was tested for gestational diabetes a few times during that time. Everything was always normal.
When Andrew was diagnosed, it was after his immunizations. Just so happens, he also got the chicken poxs a month or so before his dx. There's a child in his pre-school, dx'd right before he entered the school who also, had just been immunized. I'm begininng to think just as parents of Autistic children are that there is something going on in the soupbowl!
I was diagnosed about 2 weeks after a flu shot and about 1.5 weeks after a viral illness. I figure it is one or the other. Immunizations artificially trigger an immune response in your body (either by a weakened virus or a deactivated virus), so since diabetes is autoimmune it doesn't sound too far-fetched to me.
I'm thinking a community that has a few diagnoses all at the same time probably had a viral illness that was going around. Just in January of this month, there was an article published in the journal of medical virology that provided additional evidence that enterovirus infections can lead to insulin-producing cell destruction.
What they did is isolated a strain of virus from a child with type 1 diabetes at onset, confirmed that the virus produced chemokines (which are signals for white blood cells to come and fight an infection) capable of causing insulitis (aka insulin-producing cell destruction). FASCINATING stuff!