When 7-year-old Gus Ramsey of Weston, Massachusetts, was found to have type 1 (juvenile) diabetes in September 2007, it seemed mere coincidence that Grayson Welo, age 6 and living around the corner, had been diagnosed with the same disease a few months before. After all, type 1 was considered rare—only about 15,000 new cases were diagnosed annually in the United States at the beginning of the decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). At least Gus’s parents could be reassured that they lived in a healthy community: Weston, population 11,134, is the wealthiest town in the state, with three golf courses, 13 soccer fields, 19 baseball diamonds, and not a single fast-food restaurant.
Yet two months after Gus’s diagnosis, another child, Natalia Gormley, was found to have the disease on her tenth birthday. She lived on the other side of town. In January 2008 12-year-old Sean Richard was diagnosed. He lived less than a mile away. Then 8-year-old Finn Sullivan became the fifth case of type 1 diabetes diagnosed in Weston in less than a year. He lived on Gus’s block, just six doors down. And the cases kept on coming. Six-year-old Mya Smith, from nearby Wellesley, received the diagnosis in April. On June 15 came the jaw-dropper, when Walker Allen was diagnosed. His father, basketball star Ray Allen, scored 26 points two nights later in game six of the NBA Finals to give the Celtics their first championship in 22 years. Far more notable was Walker’s age: just 17 months.
Weston’s school nurses had never seen anything like it. There were now eight children attending Weston public schools who had type 1 diabetes, including those who had been diagnosed in previous years. That number did not even include the local kids who were too young for school, who went to private school, or who lived just over the town line. By comparison, between 1978 and 1996, the nurses could not recall there ever being more than one or two diabetic children in the 2,300-student public school system. Some years there had been none. Type 1 diabetes, after all, was supposed to be really rare.
The next month, Ann Marie Kreft (Gus’s mother), her husband, and another parent published a letter in The Boston Globe to share their concerns about the seeming cluster of type 1 diabetes in their community. “Something’s not right here,” they wrote. “The lack of a national or even statewide diabetes registry complicates monitoring efforts, and we know little about what causes type 1 diabetes. But we do know that this many diagnoses, in this tight proximity in this short period, are way out of the norm.”
Apparently the norm no longer holds. Over the next year and a half, the number of cases in the Weston-Wellesley cluster would more than double, hitting at least 18 in December 2009. Even more troubling was the discovery that the situation was not only a local phenomenon. The rising rate of adult, or type 2, diabetes is familiar and well documented, but just recently scientists have begun to realize that type 1 diabetes rates are soaring as well—around the country and around the world. Millions of children may now be at risk. And nobody knows why.
