They help preserve America’s dominance in the Pacific. They’re paying a painful price

Excerpt from reuters.com

EBEYE, Marshall Islands - Every Friday on this tiny Pacific isle, Korab Lanwe does his rounds. The people he visits have severely swollen, discolored legs, or wounds that won’t heal, or have lost a limb. They are so ill they cannot leave their homes of plywood and metal sheets. Lanwe inquires if they are taking their meds and checks their blood pressure. The result is often grim. Lanwe, who operates from an office with a rotting ceiling and boarded-up windows, is Ebeye’s diabetes coordinator. His homebound patients are in the advanced stages of a disease that plagues at least a third of the roughly 10,000 residents of Ebeye – a strip of sand 60 football fields in size, located 20 minutes by boat from an American base that has become pivotal in the U.S. showdown with China. Despite Lanwe’s efforts, his rudimentary hospital can do little as his patients’ limbs turn gangrenous and their kidneys fail. There are no dialysis machines for them, nor a prosthetics lab to replace the legs that surgeons amputate. Many people on Ebeye don’t live beyond their 50s.