Awareness

The 19th World Diabetes Congress, organized by the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), will be held in Cape Town, South Africa, on 3-7 December 2006. This conference is special in terms both of its organization and its focus. A combination of in-house congress management and the close involvement of African diabetes organizations will ensure that the conference provides a popular and productive forum for the discussion of a broad range of diabetes issues of local and global relevance. The IDF Congress Unit reports.

Bolivia is a land-locked country in central South America. Bordered by five nations, it is one of the so-called developing countries; levels of infant mortality and illiteracy are among the highest in the world. While Bolivia is rich in ethnic and cultural diversity and natural resources, including silver and natural gas, the development of the nation continues to be constrained by economic and societal problems which affect all levels of society. Furthermore, the areas of health and education have

In 1994, more than one million people died in Rwanda in one of the worst genocides in modern times. Rwandan society, at all levels including healthcare, continues to count the human and financial costs of the tragedy – a burden which is compounded by the debilitating scarcity of resources in the nation as a whole. Most of Rwanda’s 8 200 000 inhabitants are united by poverty: according to figures published by the World Bank, the yearly per capita income in Rwanda is 220 USD.

Measures of the public health importance of a health condition include the number of people affected and the number of deaths that are attributable to it. Globally, the number of people with diabetes is estimated to be just short of 200 million. However, diabetes is rarely perceived as a major contributor to mortality, largely because routine mortality statistics are based on death certificates where

It is important to know or at least be able to estimate the number of people affected by diabetes. Having this knowledge enables us to track and predict the diabetes epidemic so that healthcare can at least attempt to keep pace with the growing numbers (in practice, unfortunately, it rarely can). To have authoritative estimates of the current magnitude of the problem and projections of the likely future burden is of vital importance in continued efforts to make the case for more

In his Nobel Prize lecture, the writer VS Naipaul described from the point of view of a boy of Indian origin born in Trinidad in the 1930’s the ethnic and cultural diversity of this small southern Caribbean island state. In this culturally rich but challenging setting, with few available resources, diabetes educators have made significant advances in facilitating diabetes education in Trinidad and Tobago and in raising awareness of the condition countrywide. Zobida Ragbirsingh reports.

The human and economic consequences of the diabetic foot are extreme. Due to various complications of diabetes, a person’s foot can become vulnerable. Nerve

Editor-in-Chief's editorial

President's editorial

Obesity is rising rapidly in adult and child populations in virtually every part of the world. This brings with it a high risk of diabetes, heart disease and other serious conditions requiring expensive long-term medical care. In this article, Tim Lobstein and Philip James look at the role of governments in influencing what we eat. The authors propose ways in which governments can help to ensure that healthy diets are chosen over unhealthy ones.