Even here in Alabama, which has the highest prevalence of diabetes in the country, the rate of new cases has begun to taper. According to figures for 2013, the most recent available by state, 12.7 percent of Alabama’s residents had the disease. 
 
 In the tiny town of Eutaw, Lynette Carpenter got serious about staving off diabetes around the time her cousin’s leg was amputated because of the disease. She started to make a dish she called Sexy Pork Chops, involving a bell pepper, an onion and the oven. She weaned herself off Coca-Cola, going from about 50 cans a week to fewer than seven. And she started walking, leaving rubber bands in her mailbox to pull onto her arm — one for each mile walked — to remind her how many miles she had gone. The result made her doctor proud: She lost 42 pounds, and two years later has still not developed full-blown diabetes. 
 
 Diabetes “has got my respect and attention,” she said. “I take it real serious.” 
 
 Robin Williams, a music teacher in Birmingham, lost 33 pounds by cutting out candy, packing her lunch and not buying fast food during long bus trips to band practice, habits she learned in a Y.M.C.A. program on diabetes prevention. She started watching “My 600-lb Life,” a television show about people losing weight, with her teenage daughter. The show frightened her, as did her father’s leg amputations two years ago. She is down to 222 pounds, and is determined to keep going. 
 
 “I want to see my child grow up,” Ms. Williams said. She uses an app on her phone to track her calories. “It made me much more conscious of what I was putting in my mouth.” 
 
 Diabetes has been particularly devastating here in what is known as the Black Belt, a strip of counties that originally got its name for its fertile soil. Its majority black populations were once slaves, and later, after the Civil War, they were sharecroppers. The area had some of the worst racial violence of the Jim Crow era, said Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University, and today is among the poorest in the country. 
 
 “Black folk in the Black Belt have never not been living in poverty,” Professor Jeffries said. “It’s not a cycle, it’s linear. It’s an unbroken line from slavery forward. And it’s really critical for understanding why there’s such a health crisis in these counties.” ||||| CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the U.S. Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are chronic or acute, curable or preventable, human error or deliberate attack, CDC fights disease and supports communities and citizens to do the same. ||||| New diabetes cases are down in the U.S. for the first time in decades, according to a new CDC report. 
 
 There were 1.4 million new cases of diabetes in 2014, a drop from 1.7 million in 2008. 
 
 It's the first time in a quarter century there's been a significant decline, the CDC reported. Over that period, the number of adults between 18 and 79 with newly diagnosed diabetes cases more than tripled -- jumping from 493,000 to more than 1.4 million new cases a year. About 21.9 million Americans now live with the disease. 
 
 A study last year estimated that nearly 10 percent of U.S. adults have type 2 diabetes, and other research finds more than a third of adults have prediabetes, a high blood sugar condition that may lead to diabetes. 
 
 But this latest CDC data shows a small but promising reversal. 
 
 "This is the first time I think we can really comfortably say we've seen a decrease in incidence in the rate of new cases. For a while we were calling it a plateau," Edward Gregg, chief of epidemiology and statistics in the division of diabetes translation at the CDC, told CBS News. 
 
 Whether prevention efforts are finally bearing fruit, or if the disease has peaked, is unclear. 
 
 "When you see changes like this in a major public health problem it's always difficult to dissect what caused it. We think it's the gradual diffusion of science and education that's occurred over this last decade," Gregg said. 
 
 Health officials have been trying for years to encourage exercise and better dietary habits to help reduce the risk of diabetes. 
 
 "We learned in the last decade you could prevent diabetes. The lifestyle changes and education are not easy and it takes a while, but I think that's what we're seeing," Gregg said. 
 
 There's still a lot to be done, though, he added. 
 
 "Our incidence rate is 60 percent higher than it was back in the early nineties. If we use that as a benchmark of where we could be and should be, we have a long way to go," Gregg said. He is presenting the new data at a diabetes conference in Vancouver on Wednesday.
– Some big news in America's public health arena: The number of new cases of diabetes is clearly falling for the first time in 25 years, reports the New York Times. Stats released Tuesday by the CDC show a nearly 20% drop from 2008 to 2014 in what the newspaper calls "the first sustained decline" since diabetes began booming in the 1990s. Specifically, the US saw 1.4 million new cases in 2014, down from 1.7 million in 2008. There's still plenty of major trouble spots: The decline is pronounced among white people and less so for AfricanAmericans and Hispanics, and a notable gap remains in regard to education levels. "It's not yet time for a parade," says the head of the diabetes program at Massachusetts General Hospital. But, he adds, "It has finally entered into the consciousness of our population that the sedentary lifestyle is a real problem, that increased body weight is a real problem." CBS notes that 10% of adults in the US are believed to have type 2 diabetes and that more than a third have prediabetes—a condition that can lead to the full disease—which makes any sign that the numbers have peaked welcome. A CDC researcher calls the results "a little surprising" given the decades-long increases. But "it seems pretty clear now that incidence rates have actually started to drop." (Meanwhile, a novel new treatment could one day make daily insulin injections a thing of the past.)