Saturday, November 15, 2008
Happy Diabetes Day! (A Day Late)
Recently I had stumbled onto a BBC article on diabetes with the advent of 'Internation Diabetes Day' on November 14, and I feel that attention should be drawn to this disease that is rapidly moving through the world and affection hundreds of millions of people. With the epidemic outbreaks of HIV/AIDS in Africa, the rapid spread of malaria, and random SARS outbreaks in Asia, it is very hard to look at other diseases that are just as widely spread and equally dangerous. We take for granted even the common cold, which poses threats to everyone's health without the proper medicine. While Africa is dealing with the AIDS spread, southern Asia, India in particular, has been plagued with diabetes. Diabetes is a disease that can cause heart disease, blindness, lose of limbs, and even death. Worldwide, diabetes is responsible for the deaths of 3 million people, and has plagued over a quarter of a billion people. India has the most cases of diabetes, and it is estimated that 100 million people have contracted the disease. Type II diabetes is blazing through the rural areas of India, but has been overlooked for reasons that I cannot explain. There is a lot of buzz around AIDS, as there should be, but there are a lot more diseases that affect millions of more people.
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2 comments:
Ian, I agree with you that more attention should be paid to more widely increasing diseases, including diabetes. I think there are two main reasons why more attention has not been paid to diabetes. The first is that it is not contagious. AIDS, malaria, and SARS are, and they therefore cause a great and immediate threat to everyone, not just those infected. The second reason is that in the case of Type II diabetes (which occurs in over 70% of all diabetes cases worldwide), the main cause is lack of exercise and an improper diet. So diabetes is usually caused because of problems on an individual level, not on a higher or more institutional level.
Ian, do you have data on which population (race, socioeconomic levels, age, gender, etc) is most affected by diabetes? Also, what are some of the current programs and effort to curb the disease?
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