It's not surprising to see China as "number one" in so many things, but I was surprised by the magnitude of this development:
According to the report, more than 92 million adults in China have diabetes, and nearly 150 million more are well on their way to developing it. The disease is more common in people with large waistlines and in those who live in cities, the report indicates.
"For every person in the world with HIV there are three people in China with diabetes," said David Whiting, an epidemiologist with the International Diabetes Federation, who was not involved in the research.
The Federation projected last year that some 435 million people would have diabetes by 2030. "With this new study, we're going to have to rerun our estimate," Whiting told Reuters Health.
The full story is here.
Many things follow rising prosperity. Is diabetes one of them?
It is one of those conditions which are not strictly delimited
since, in its later stages, it can affect blood circulation, sight,
keep wounds from healing quickly, and lead to infections. The
overweight are at particular risk.
For more details (and I doubt many MR readers will want them) see our article in “American Journal of Managed Care,” vol 15, No. 9, 593-601; http://www.ajmc.com, by Weibing Wang, William McGreevey and others, “Type 2 diabetes mellitus in China: A preventable economic burden.” An effective prevention program coud have saved US$26 billion in 2007 and a projected US$47 billion in 2030. This article marks a significant advance in empirical cost-effectiveness research in China’s health sector, due mostly to cooperative work by researchers at medical universities in Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and Guangzhou.
“For every person in the world with HIV there are three people in China with diabetes,” said David Whiting, an epidemiologist with the International Diabetes Federation, who was not involved in the research.
Kudos to David Whiting for his refreshingly penetrating quote here. Most experts in a given field tend to shy away from explicit comparisons of their field to competing fields, especially in print. But those comparisons are often remarkably informative, even if they do perturb the other fields’ experts. Yay for informative.
It is ‘weird’ how prevalence rates of diabetes and obesity tend to spike with the rise in consumption of food and drink products imported from nations with high prevalence rates of diabetes and obesity. Weird?
@Bob, bkarn: It communicates the scale of the problem, relative to another similar problem. Put another way, the quote contextualizes the number “92 million”. That’s a simple but important function.
I don’t view the statement as a complaint about funding per se, but perhaps as a complaint about popular attention more generally.
Because of that one-sentence quote, I have changed my inner sense of how important a global problem diabetes is compared to AIDS. I realize that the numbers of people afflicted is only one half of the story; the disruption caused to the afflicted and the society they live in is the other half. AIDS may be more disruptive to those it afflicts than diabetes (striking younger, more delibitating/lethal perhaps). But nonetheless I thought the quote was a nice statistical tidbit.
I don’t see why this would surprise anyone. The Chinese eat a lot of refined carbs, they are living longer, result: diabetes.
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