Fighting diabetes

An innovative community-based diabetes prevention program developed here, which has demonstrated its effectiveness among inner-city African Americans, is now being modified by American Indians for use on a remote southern Arizona reservation with one of the world's highest diabetes rates.

Studies have shown that the rate of non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) among Indians of the Tohono O'odham Nation is six times higher than in the general population of the United States. The reservation has the highest mortality rate from the disease of any area served by the Indian Health Service, 40 percent of tribe members over 35 have diabetes, and as many as 10 percent of the tribe's members have had lower extremities amputated because of complications from the disease.

Five Tohono O'odham women came to campus in November as part of a pilot demonstration project that will recruit and train members of the tribal community to develop their own program to prevent diabetes. The tribal council unanimously approved the program, which stresses education about exercise and better nutrition.

Wendy Auslander, Ph.D., associate professor of social work and a longtime diabetes prevention researcher, is the principal investigator for the project. She has worked closely with Eddie Brown, director of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work's Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies, to develop liaisons with the Tohono O'odham community. The project is funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health to the Diabetes and Research Training Center at the School of Medicine.

Part of the problem in developing a prevention program for the Tohono O'odham, said Auslander, is that the 10,000 members of the tribe living on its four reservation areas are scattered over nearly 3 million acres of desert and mountains. In addition, more than 60 percent of the reservation's residents live below the poverty level and 23.4 percent of them are unemployed.

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Arvidson installed as McDonnell Professor

Raymond E. Arvidson, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts and Sciences, was installed as James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor Nov. 30 at a ceremony in Holmes Lounge.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton praised Arvidson for his outstanding teaching and research and his success in building one of the most distinguished departments of earth and planetary sciences in the nation.

"Our Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences today is recognized as one of the best anywhere, thanks in large part to Ray Arvidson's work and dedication from the moment he arrived here in 1974 to today," Wrighton said. "His research in space sciences closely reflects the vision of James S. McDonnell, who anticipated some of the achievements that Ray has been involved with in his career.

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Learning in cyberspace

"Google. NewHoo. Dogpile." The gurgling jabber of your just-turned-2 niece? Hardly. Rather, the whimsical labels are a sampling of one of the most powerful teaching tools available at one's fingertips -- Internet search engines.

That nugget was just one among a gold mine of information recently offered at "The Web as a Teaching Tool" -- a series of three hands-on workshops co-sponsored by the Teaching Center, Arts and Sciences Computing and the Libraries.

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