Diabetes has reached Epidemic Proportions

It is currently estimated that 366 million people worldwide currently suffer from diabetes. It is not a benign disease and it kills one person every seconds throughout the world. Healthcare systems have taken heed and have begun to work on programs to detect diabetes early, prevent diabetes altogether and treat the disease in the best possible way.

While there is both type I diabetes and type II diabetes, the vast majority of sufferers have type II disease. It is believed to be caused by obesity, poor diet, lack of exercise and generally not taking care of oneself. It is not just a disease of developed countries. People in developing countries are slowly catching up in incidence and unfortunately have a lesser degree of treatment available to them.

Diabetics cannot control the amount of sugar in their diet due to insulin resistance and the inability of insulin to put sugar into the cells. The more Western the diet in the individual, the greater is the incidence of diabetes. Side effects of untreated diabetes include blindness, stroke and peripheral vascular and nerve damage. Deaths from diabetes directly have reached 4.6 million people per year worldwide.

Meetings are scheduled on an international level to find out ways to stop this epidemic. Such ways need to be acceptable to all ethnicities and nationalities of the world and should focus on increasing the level of personal exercise, decreasing weight and eating a diet with less processed foods and sugary foods. This can be a big bill to fill as different cultures accept exercise and weight management differently.

Some people believe the fight should be at the corporate level with fewer companies providing packaged foods to the poor and more companies practicing preventative programs for their employees who can be screened for diabetes before symptoms or side effects develop.

The international help group in these areas want to tackle companies like tobacco companies, and food and drink companies that sell the products that are making people sick. This is a highly politically charged issue that would take a great deal of diplomacy to make sweeping changes in how people eat, drink or use tobacco. The NCD Alliance, however, a group of 2000 health organizations from throughout the world believes that if only $9 billion per year were spent on changing the way people live their lives, sweeping changes could be made in the incidence of diabetes and other noncommunicable diseases.

Such an agreement in funds, however, would have to come from a widely varying set of politicians, each of whom have lobbyists from some of these companies arguing against such an outlay of funds. There are some countries, in fact, that just do not have the funds to donate to such a cause.