Nearly 7,000 children and young Britons under 25 have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, the chronic condition linked to obesity that can lead to amputations and blindness. Type 2 diabetes used to be virtually unknown in young people. It usually develops over the age of 40 in white Europeans, or after the age of 25 in people who are African-Caribbean, black African, or south Asian. The startling new figures come from Diabetes UK, which has combined the numbers of children seen by hospital specialists with those for the young people up to age 25 who are looked after by their GP. Only 715 are receiving care from hospital units, but there are more than 6,000 in primary care, bringing the total to 6,836. Prof Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), which made the hospital figures public earlier this year, said the new data confirmed the real total was higher than feared. “When the RCPCH’s paediatric diabetes audit launched in the