Extending Our Reach

With this issue, Preventing Chronic Disease (PCD) begins its second year of publication. The expertise and enthusiasm of our authors, editors, reviewers, and board members enabled PCD to provide our readers with a unique view of public health and chronic disease in 2004: • Peer-reviewed articles of original research, community case studies, literature reviews, and special topics in public health. • Educational information for professionals on public health law, social marketing, consortia development, and geographic information systems. • Information for community advocates on community-based participatory research, conference and media campaigns, and community cancer programs. • Original art and multimedia presentations related to the populations of public health. Since we published our first issue, PCD has received more than 9000 subscriptions and more than 1.9 million Web site hits. Additionally, the journal has been accepted for indexing in PubMed/Medline, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) and will provide all articles to the PubMed Central open access catalog. But beyond these numbers, PCD demonstrated that it is possible to create an online journal that achieves its original goals: to establish dialogue between researchers and practitioners; to explore new concepts in chronic disease prevention; and to emphasize multidisciplinary, mul-tisectorial approaches to public health. We begin our second year by extending PCD's multime-dia capacity and offering selected articles in Spanish. We thank Dr. Barbara Bowman of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for serving as guest editor for this issue, which features articles that address the public health challenges of diabetes along the border of Mexico and the United States. We have provided Spanish and English translations for selected border health articles and editorials, as well as for all border health abstracts. We look forward to hearing from our readers on the usefulness of selected translations. The border region along the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) has its own culture, distinct from other communities in either country. The food, the festivals, and the politics are all shared by the fronterizos. Chronic disease morbidity is also shared across the border. In the communities described in this issue, 20% of the Mexican Americans older than 39 have diabetes. The Arizona Border Health ¡SI! program is multisectoral and designed to encourage prevention and control of diabetes (1). East of the communities of Border Health ¡SI!, the …