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Right now, there are about 30 million folks in the United States with diabetes and about half of those folks with diabetes will develop neuropathy or what one of my mentors used to call loss of the gift of pain. And that neuropathy can lead someone to wear a hole in their foot just like you or I were a hole in a sock or a shoe. Now that hole is called an ulcer, a diabetic foot ulcer. And that happens a few million times a year in the United States. Once it occurs, about half of those folks will require an antibiotic, will get infected at some time during the life cycle of the wound. Once that happens, about 20% of them will end up with some degree of an amputation and some level of an amputation. That’s why right now, unfortunately there’s an amputation performed every 20 seconds around the world. But I’m here to tell you that nearly all of those amputations are preventable. And our goal together, is to try to work to do that. More important than that is to try to work together to try to keep us, both you and me and all of our friends moving through the world. And that’s really the goal of our group at SALSA. And it’s the group of many of us that work really hard to both heal people with diabetes and wounds, and to keep them healed. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about.
