Michael Preston

Click above to to see an audio slideshow from the event

Bangladeshi’s are one of New York City’s fastest growing immigrant communities, but they also have another, less fortunate, and dangerous, distinction: as a group, they are developing diabetes at an alarming rate.

Diabetes is spreading rapidly within the Asian American population in general and within the Bangladeshi community specifically. According to research conducted by the Asian American Diabetes Initiative at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Asian Americans are twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes as are Caucasians.

As the number of Bangladeshis in the city exploded, so did their rates of being diagnosed with the disease. There are now over 25,000 Bangladeshi Americans in the New York City area, up from just a few thousand residents in the early part of this decade according to estimates from the 2007 American Community Survey. The majority of the Bangladeshi community is centered in Jackson Heights in Queens and in Kensington and Borough Park in Brooklyn. Many fled to America to pursue better economic opportunities and to escape from their home country’s political instability and extremely high levels of poverty and disease. So it is ironic that 25 percent of the city’s Bangladeshi residents are thought to have some form of diabetes.

To fight the spreading growth of the disease, an outreach program based at the Center for the Study of Asian American Health at New York University is focusing on using a series of public meetings to raise awareness about diabetes and promote preventative measures within the Bangladeshi community.

“We need to make assessments, we need to learn, and then we need to take action,” said Shamsul Haque, the Consul General of Bangladesh in New York, who spoke at a recent event, “Voices from the Community: Diabetes Among Bangladeshis in NYC”, hosted by the D.R.E.A.M. Project.

The year-old D.R.E.A.M. Project, which stands for Diabetes Research Education and Action for Minorities, is offering free six-month educational programs taught by community health workers that will show patients how to monitor their symptoms, modify their diets and use exercise to help stave off complications of the disease, such as blindness, limb amputations, and kidney failure. Through this outreach project, activists hope to spread the word to Bangladeshis who might otherwise have no warning of the danger lurking in their new lives.

The reasons for the accelerated spread of the diabetes within the Bangladeshi community are both genetic and environmental, though it’s the latter that most often accounts for the higher diabetes contraction rates seen in Asian Americans. While research continues on the subject, a preliminary finding seems to indicate that shifting from a diet that incorporated vegetables, rice and fish to a more Westernized, high fat-high calorie diet is a contributing factor.

Krittika Ghosh, a project coordinator at the D.R.E.A.M. Project, emphasized a related aspect of the dietary dimension; the relative availability of food that contributes to overeating.

“Food is more easily accessible here than in the home country,” she said. “Things that were very special occasion foods, like biryani and curries, those were not eaten every day back home.”

Nadia Islam, the Deputy Director of Research for the program, said that many of the newest arrivals become sedentary because they are forced to accept housing in poorer neighborhoods where crime might be an issue. Living in less safe neighborhoods leads many to stay indoors for longer periods of time, decreasing their level of physical activity.

She also cited the lack of health insurance and access to other resources as a reason for the lack of knowledge that many Bangladeshi Americans have about the disease.

“A large portion of the Bangladeshi community are working in low wage positions, non-standardized work like taxi driving, restaurant workers, domestic workers, so industries where there really are no access to benefit packages,” she said.

The situation with the taxi drivers displays just how much of an acute problem the insurance issue has become. Manmunul Huq, a community health worker for the D.R.E.A.M. Project and a founder of the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance, says that nearly 80 percent of the city’s cab drivers lack health care coverage and that over 20 percent of the city’s cab operators are Bangladeshi.

“Those guys are working 12 hours shifts, 7 days a week, keeping this city moving, but they don’t have any stable income, health benefits, time off benefits, nothing,” he said.

This lack of coverage prevents many drivers from receiving screening tests and treatment for the diabetes wreaking havoc on the Bangladeshi community

Huq and his fellow activist hope that through the D.R.E.A.M Project and other efforts that members of his community who moved to New York to start over will win their rights and achieve better outcomes for their lives.

Maureen Sullivan contributed reporting for this story. To find out more about the challenges facing other immigrant communities in Brooklyn, click here.