National Diabetes Day launched in Accra November 14, 2014 Daily Graphic

The 2014 National Diabetes Day has been launched in Accra with a call on health authorities to intensify education on the disease to raise awareness of its prevention and control.
Speaking at a ceremony to launch the day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) Representative in Ghana, Dr Magda Robalo, said creating awareness about Diabetes  would help reduce the prevalence rate of between six and 9.7 per cent in the country.
Statistics available to the National Diabetes Association indicates that there are more than four million diabetic patients in the country aged between 34 and 64 years.
Dr Robalo said a well-structured education programmes for the public, patients and health professionals were needed in the efforts to manage the disease.
The United Nations (UN) passed a resolution to designate November 14 as World Diabetes Day in 2006. 
The occasion is aimed at raising awareness of diabetes, its prevention and complications and the care that people with the condition need.
 The World Diabetes Day 2014 campaign is on the theme “Healthy living and diabetes”. The launch which was organised by the National Diabetes Association with support from the Ministry of Health was attended by schoolchildren and nurses.
Diabetes is chronic disease that results in the accumulation of excess glucose sugar in the blood of an individual due to the inability of the pancreas to release adequate insulin to mop up excess glucose in the blood storage.
There are two main types of diabetes which are Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body does not produce insulin because the cells are destroyed.
Type 2 occurs when individuals  system does not produce enough insulin which controls the amount of sugar in the blood, so the blood sugar level become very high.

Upsurge of diabetes
According to Dr Robalo, 14.7 million adults in the African Region suffered from diabetes which resulted in 344,000 deaths in 2011. During the same period, she said countries in the region spent nearly $2.8billion on the disease.
She further stated that modernisation and rapid urbanisation, coupled with aggressive marketing of unhealthy foods, played major roles in the upsurge of diabetes in Africa and the rest of the world.
As part of the steps taken to tackle the disease, Dr Robalo said, Ghana had developed a draft national policy framework for non-communicable disease which included diabetes with support from the WHO.

Complications of diabetes
In a speech read on his behalf, the Minister of Health, Dr Kwaku Agyemang-Mensah described diabetes as a serious chronic, debilitating and costly disease that imposed lifelong demands on the patients and their families.
He said diabetic patients suffered complications when cases remained undiagnosed and inadequate access to proper treatment and appropriate medicines, especially, the insulin.
When the complications set in, he explained, that diabetes could cause neurological and vascular complications, visual disorder, impotence, heart diseases, stroke and kidney failure among other diseases.
In her address, the President of the National Diabetes Association, Mrs Elizabeth Esi Denyoh said diabetes was high in adolescents due to poor nutrition and unhealthy lifestyles.
On the challenges facing the association, she said the association was financially constraint, adding that it did not receive any support from the government.
She also expressed worry about the huge taxes imposition on diabetes products, saying that the government should remove taxes imposed on diabetic products imported into the country.