An American Epidemic Diabetes

摘要

Something terrible was happening to Yolanda Benitez's eyes. They were being poisoned; the fragile capillaries of the retina attacked from within and were leaking blood. The first symptoms were red lines, appearing vertically across her field of vision; the lines multiplied and merged into a haze that shut out light entirely. "Her blood vessels inside her eye were popping," says her daughter, Jannette Roman, a Chicago college student. Benitez, who was in her late 40 s when the problem began four years ago, was a cleaning woman, but she's had to stop working. After five surgeries, she has regained vision in one eye, but the other is completely useless. A few weeks ago, awakening one night in a hotel bedroom, she walked into a door, setting off a paroxysm of pain and nausea that hasn't let up yet. And what caused this catastrophe was nothing as exotic as pesticides or emerging viruses. What was poisoning Benitez was sugar.