Tag: KNBA

Diabetes is epidemic among Native Americans and rates have continued to increase since the 1960s. At the National Indian Health Board annual conference in Anchorage last week, participants discussed ways to convince Congress to keep the Special Diabetes Program for Indians going, in an era of tight federal budgets.

Yesterday (Tuesday), with Alaska's U.S. senators Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich and several senior federal agency officials, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius took part in a roundtable discussion hosted by Southcentral Foundation, an Alaska Native healthcare organization serving Anchorage, the Mat-Su Valley, and several rural villages.

Intensive management, or lethal predator control, of bears and wolves is mandated by a 1994 law adopted by the state Legislature. But the authors of an article in the August issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management say the state isn’t doing the research necessary to know if its causing long-term, perhaps even permanent damage to Alaska’s grizzly bear population.