In observance of National Diabetes Month and World Diabetes Day on November 14^th, the National Institute of Health urges people to set goals to make plans to prevent diabetes and diabetes related complications. This year the focus is on promoting health after gestational diabetes. Gestational diabetes is a type of diabetes that develops during pregnancy. Mothers who have had gestational diabetes need to know that they and their children have an increased lifelong risk for developing type 2 diabetes.

Most of the time, gestational diabetes goes away after the baby is born. Even if the diabetes goes away, you have a greater chance of getting diabetes – and your child from that pregnancy is at future risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes. In fact, half of all women who had gestational diabetes go on to develop type 2 diabetes.

If you have had gestational diabetes it is important to get tested for type 2 diabetes within 12 weeks after your baby is born. If the test is normal, get tested every 3 years. Talk to your doctor if you plan to become pregnant again in the future.

Keep up healthy habits for a lifetime to prevent or delay type 2 diabetes. Even if you know what to do to improve your health, figuring out how to do it and fitting it into your daily routine can be the challenging part. The first step is to think about what is important to you and your health. Next, determine what changes you are willing and able to make. Third, you will decide what steps will help you reach your health goals.

You have most likely heard me talk about an “Action Plan” in the past. This is the perfect time to revisit that concept. The most important part of an action plan is to choose something you want to do. Next it needs to be something reasonable, such as something you can expect to be able to accomplish in a week or two. A true action plan is behavior specific. Losing weight is not a behavior; not eating after dinner is.

An action plan answers these questions: What? How much? When? How often? The final piece of a successful action plan is to assess the confidence level that you will fulfill the contract. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 represents little confidence and 10 represents total confidence, your plan should rank at least a 7. Once you have incorporated that action or goal into your daily life you are ready to choose something else to work on. I wrote a fact sheet a few years ago titled, “Action Plan for Healthy Living” which focuses on 15 lifestyle changes. If you have questions about developing an action plan related to a change you want to make, feel free to give me a call.

One final thought about National Diabetes Month – consider offering healthier choices at upcoming holiday celebrations that are centered around food. Almost any recipe can be modified by cutting down or changing the type of fat or sweetener used. Be respectful of your holiday guests’ dietary restrictions. Always have fresh vegetable and fruit plates available.

Donna Krug is the Family & Consumer Science Agent and District Director in the Cottonwood Extension District. You may reach her at: (620)793-1910 or [email protected]

“Science knows no country because knowledge belongs to no country and is the torch which illuminates the world.” These are the words of the great French chemist Louis Pasteur.

Recently, I spoke at a National Agricultural Conference here in Yangling, China. Other speakers here were from the United Kingdom, India, Turkey, two from the U.S.D.A (one from Manhattan, KS) and an assortment of smaller countries that had interests in the continually expanding knowledge about our soils, better crop production, reducing pesticides, identifying new insects, etc. There were also local Chinese researchers who spoke. They shared recent Chinese advances that in turn would be taken back and shared worldwide.

But the day before, I added the above quote by Pasteur as my last “slide.” Why? I am disturbed by recent rhetoric and proposals that condemn students and professors who study and teach across national borders. Some want researchers, who travel to teach and spread our latest scientific knowledge at conferences and in classrooms, to stay home.

Parties in Washington D.C. have discussed sending huge numbers of certain foreign students home. University programs that recruit professors to teach overseas are being portrayed as just attempts at espionage. This scapegoating, coming from the highest levels in America, suggests we should hunker down and hold all of our knowledge to our chest. –That the U.S. is always the inventor, the leader. –And that the rest of the world only rises because they steal from us.

But every table of chemical elements that hangs in the labs of Europe, Africa, China, Russia and the United States–is the same. While helium was suspected as a new element from its absorption in light spectra, the first time it was actually captured and identified was in oil well gasses by the Chemistry Department at the University of Kansas. But K.U. cannot and did not patent helium. This is knowledge that makes up the body of science. It is taught worldwide. It belongs to all.

Certainly there is research conducted by private enterprises and a country’s military, sometimes in cooperation with their universities. Such projects of course have obligations to filter their personnel and protect their inventions. But such projects are very limited. But these political discussions and actions are broad brush, casting doubt on whole international exchange programs and whole groups of students and teachers.

University World News reported that “In May, the Trump administration announced that the validity of visas issued to Chinese graduate students studying in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics would be shortened to only one year.”

There are now unjustified wholesale attacks on Confucius Institutes and exchange systems such as the “Thousand Talents” program. For ten years, I have seen the Chinese “Thousand Talent” program recruit experts from around the world to teach in China for five years. I personally know several, one American in forestry and another who is Chinese and brought his 10 years of expertise in modern agricultural practices. These scholars also come from Europe and Australia and elsewhere. In many ways, it is just a longer term version of our Fulbright awards. Are our Fulbright scholars spies?

Of the nearly 7,000 Thousand Talent scholars sponsored over this last decade, there are currently about 2,600 currently working in China. In some fields, those that return to the U.S. will be bringing back some state-of-the-art academic knowledge because, contrary to popular knowledge, China is now leading the world in various fields of science, particularly in physics.

This politicization of science is not new. This condemning of whole groups of teachers and students is scapegoating. The egregious show trials of Senator Joe McCarthy of the early 1950s cost us dearly in science talent. It was wrong then. And it is wrong now.

This was understood by no less than the Frenchman Louis Pasteur and the German Robert Koch who revolutionized medicine with their new germ theory in the 1870s. France and Germany were not friendly countries. Yet both scientists respected and fed off of each other’s work for the mutual benefit of all humanity. It was unthinkable to either of them to hide their work and results so as to only cure their countrymen.

Indeed, Pasteur said precisely that. “One does not ask of one who suffers: what is your country and what is your religion? One merely says: you suffer, that is enough for me….” Amen.

John Richard Schrock is a professor at Emporia State University.