Our Public Service Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Health was presented to The American Diabetes Association.
CURE. CARE. COMMITMENT.

Diabetes is deadly and, if present trends continue, one out of every three kids born in 2000 will develop diabetes. For African Americans or Latinos, it’s one out of two.

Diabetes is diagnosed in more than 10% of adults, and a quarter of those older than 60 have diabetes.

And diabetes is on the rise. There are 23.6 million Americans with diabetes, and 57 million Americans with pre-diabetes right now, but the total prevalence of diabetes increased 13.5% from 2005 to 2007.

For the millions of children and adults with diabetes, the future means being on guard all day and all night against a disease that can shut you down, piece by piece, if you aren’t always vigilant.

The American Diabetes Association is out to change the future of diabetes.

The American Diabetes Association is the nation’s leading voluntary health organization that is fighting diabetes through research, information, and advocacy. The American Diabetes Association has spent millions of dollars to fund research into curing diabetes, and successfully treating and managing the disease. They have advocated in courts and in legislatures to increase funding for diabetes research, to improve healthcare quality and access, and to combat discrimination against people with diabetes. And the American Diabetes Association has been in communities throughout the country, providing programs and information that improve the lives of people affected by this deadly disease.

For more information please call the American Diabetes Association at 1-800-DIABETES (1-800-342-2383) or visit www.diabetes.org.

Our Public Service Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Infectious Disease Field was presented to ANTHONY S. FAUCI, MD

Anthony S. Fauci, MD, has made seminal contributions to the understanding of pathogenesis and treatment of immune-mediated diseases. As director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci has become the public face of AIDS research and efforts to combat bioterror. Throughout his 40+ years of service to the NIH, Dr. Fauci has pioneered the field of human immunoregulation by making a number of basic scientific observations that serve as the basis for current understanding of human immune response.

Dr. Fauci is a native of Brooklyn, New York, and received his MD degree from Cornell University Medical College. His career at the NIH began in 1968 as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Rising through the ranks, Dr. Fauci became the Director of NIAID in 1984 and continues to oversee an extensive research portfolio of basic and applied research to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria and illness from potential agents of bioterrorism. Dr. Fauci oversees a $4.4 billion research portfolio at NIAID and serves as a key advisor to the White House and Department of Health and Human Services on global AIDS issues and on projects to increase medical and public health preparedness against emerging infectious diseases.

Dr. Fauci is widely recognized for delineating the precise mechanisms whereby immunosuppressive agents modulate the human immune response. He has developed effective therapies for formerly fatal diseases such as polyarteritis nodosa, Wegener’s granulomatosis, and lymphomatoid granulomatosis. He is credited with making some of the most important advances in patient management in rheumatology in the past 20 years.

After 9/11 and the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, the White House called upon Dr. Fauci to define a program that would use scientific and medical expertise to develop countermeasures against the commonly associated threats—anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, and other weaponized microbes. His team organized a research and development program to provide diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines against the agents that intelligence believed to be of the highest risk for use in an attack.

The Institute for Scientific Information reported that Dr. Fauci is among the most cited scientists of all time throughout the world, most notably for his work on HIV/AIDS. Dr. Fauci has served as Visiting Professor at major medical centers around the world.

Our Public Service Award for Inspiration was presented to Team Hoyt

Dick and Rick Hoyt are a fatherand- son team from Massachusetts who together have competed in over 970 road races and triathlons in the last 28 years—including 25 Boston Marathons. They have even competed several times in the Ironman Triathlon— that daunting, almost superhuman combination of 26.2 miles of running, 112 miles of bicycling, and 2.4 miles of swimming. Together they have climbed mountains, and once trekked 3,735 miles across America. It’s a remarkable record of exertion—all the more so when you consider that Rick can’t walk or talk.

For the past twenty-eight years or more Dick, who is 68, has pushed and pulled his son across the country and over hundreds of finish lines. When Dick runs, Rick is in a wheelchair that Dick is pushing. When Dick cycles, Rick is in the seatpod from his wheelchair, attached to the front of the bike. When Dick swims, Rick is in a small but heavy, firmly stabilized boat being pulled by Dick.

Their story begins at Rick’s birth in 1962. The umbilical cord was coiled around Rick’s neck which cut off oxygen to his brain. Dick and his wife, Judy, were told that there would be no hope for their child’s development. “It’s been a story of exclusion ever since he was born,” Dick has said. “When he was eight months old the doctors told us we should just put him away—he’d be a vegetable all his life.” The couple brought their son home determined to raise him as “normally” as possible.

In 1975, Rick was finally admitted into a public school. Two years later, he told his father, through his customized computer, that he wanted to participate in a five-mile benefit run for a local lacrosse player who had been paralyzed in an accident. Dick agreed to push Rick in his wheelchair. They finished next to last, but they felt they had achieved a triumph. That night, Dick remembers, “Rick told us he just didn’t feel handicapped when we were competing.”

“Rick is the one who inspires and motivates me, the way he just loves sports and competing,” Dick said. And the business of inspiring evidently works as a two-way street. Rick typed out this testimony: “Dad is one of my role models. Once he sets out to do something, Dad sticks to it whatever it is, until it is done. For example, once we decided to really get into triathlons, Dad worked out, up to five hours a day, five times a week, even when he was working.”

Most of all, perhaps, the Hoyts can see an impact from their efforts in the area of the disabled, and on public attitudes toward the physically and mentally challenged.

You may learn more about Team Hoyt on their website, www.teamhoyt.com.