WASHINGTON – What if my blood sugar’s too high today? Is it time for my blood pressure pill? With nagging text messages or more customized two-way interactions, researchers are trying to harness the power of cell phones to help fight chronic diseases.

“I call it medical minutes,” says Dr. Richard Katz of George Washington University Hospital in the nation’s capital.

He’s testing whether inner-city diabetics, an especially hard-to-treat population, might better control their blood sugar — and thus save Medicaid dollars — by tracking their disease using Internet-connected cell phones, provided with reduced monthly rates as long as they regularly comply.

Consider Tyrone Harvey, 43, who learned he had diabetes seven years ago only after getting so sick he was hospitalized for a week, and who has struggled to lower his blood sugar ever since. In May, through a study Katz began with nearby Howard University Hospital’s diabetes clinic, Harvey received a Web-based personal health record that he clicks onto using his cell phone, to record his daily blood sugar measurements.

If Harvey enters a reading higher or lower than preset danger thresholds, a text message automatically pings a warning, telling him what to do. And at checkups, doctors will use the personal health record, created by Indiana-based NoMoreClipboard.com, to track all his fluctuations and decide what next steps to advise.

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THE ITURI FOREST, Congo – They emerge from the stillness of the rainforest like a lost tribe of prehistoric warriors forgotten by time — a barefoot band of Mbuti Pygmies wielding iron-tipped spears.

The men come first, cloaked head to toe in coiled hunting nets shaved from the liana vine. Then the women, lugging hand-woven baskets filled with the same bloodstained antelope their ancestors survived on for thousands of years.

And waiting anxiously in the middle of their smoke-filled hunting camp: a horde of village traders who’ve come to buy as much bushmeat as the Mbuti can bring.

Time has long stood still in the innermost reaches of northeast Congo’s Ituri Forest — a remote and crepuscular world without electricity or cell phones that’s so isolated, the Pygmies living here have never heard of Barack Obama or the Internet or the war in Afghanistan. But the future is coming, on a tidal wave of demand for game meat that’s pushing an army of tall Bantu traders ever deeper into Africa’s primordial vine-slung jungles.

It’s a demand so voracious, experts warn it could drive some of Africa’s last hunter-gatherers to eradicate the very wildlife that sustains them, and with it, their own forest-dwelling existence.

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