The Canadian Diabetes Association says 3.4-million people in this country are impacted by the disease.
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“Obesity is the most important risk factor for type 2 diabetes and our attempts to control rising rates of obesity have so far not proved successful”, said Majid Ezzati, a professor at Imperial College London who led the World Health Organization research.
WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan said: “If we are to make any headway in halting the rise in diabetes, we need to rethink our daily lives: to eat healthily, be physically active, and avoid excessive weight gain”.
Health experts haven’t found a way to prevent Type 1 diabetes, which consists of a body unable to produce enough insulin, a peptide hormone that regulates blood sugar.
The report combined incidences of type 1 and type 2 diabetes but the surge in cases is due to type 2, which is closely linked to obesity and poor lifestyle.
Type 2 diabetes used to be considered a disease of older age but obesity is driving cases among younger age groups. Stroke trailed behind the ischaemic heart disease as the second leading cause of deaths in the world, with 6.7 million deaths as of 2012. The theme of this year’s World Health Day, which is on April 7, is “beat diabetes”.
It is the first global report on the chronic ailment which came with a call on governments to ensure its people could make healthy choices and the nation’s health system could diagnose, treat and care for diabetics.
Patients and scores of families continue to live through poor medical facilities in government hospitals as the World Health Organisation (WHO) marks annual World Health Day today, Dunya News reported Thursday.
Whereas about 108 million people suffered from the disease in 1989, that number has almost quadrupled to 422 million by 2014, the report found.
Compared to Western Europe, diabetes rates rose much more sharply in low- and middle-income countries, such as China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Pakistan.
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Libby Dowling, Senior Clinical Advisor at Diabetes UK, said: “It is estimated that, if nothing changes, five million people in the UK will be living with the condition by 2025, making the need to tackle this serious health condition more urgent than ever”. “We must also improve diabetes diagnosis and access to essential medicines such as insulin”. This year, the World Health Organization has issued a call to action on diabetes-a condition it says has exploded over the past several decades …and is taking an especially heavy toll in Asia.
