The Hurricane Relief effort will probably have a pretty big effect on charity fundraising for a while, as 9/11 did a few years ago. I remember being involved in a diabetes fundraiser shortly after the terrorist attacks, and our position was, “The terrorists didn’t take diabetes away with them on 9/11. Diabetes is still with us and still needs to be cured.”

The same is true now: Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of things; unfortunately, diabetes wasn’t one of them. If anything, we...