MAMM Celebrates World Diabetes Day

by **Admin** Sat Oct 21, 2017 9:22 pm

To mark this year’s World Diabetes Day, a non-governmental organisation, Mark Anumah Medical Mission (MAMM) in collaboration with World Diabetes Foundation (WDF) recently embarked on a sensitisation campaign on the prevention of diabetes in 20 selected secondary schools in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
The project which focused on conducting workshops for teachers and students in the selected schools on healthy eating behaviour and physical activity also screened the young people for risk factors related to diabetes and hypertension.
Speaking during one of the workshops held at Olumawu Secondary School, Abuja, the chairperson of the mission, Professor Felicia Anumah, described diabetes as a pandemic prevalent in every country.
She disclosed that the world had 382 million people with diabetes and that by 2035, the figure could rise to 592million.
Anumah, a professor of medicine at the University of Abuja and a Consultant Endocrinologist at the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital (UATH), said that the prevalence of diabetes cases ranged from 2.5 per cent in the rural areas to 15 per cent in the cities.
She said: “The symptoms of type 2 diabetes are so slow to appear [that] they can go unnoticed. In fact, half the people with type 2 diabetes do not even know they have it and this puts them at risk of heart attack, blindness, kidney failure and limb loss.
“With urbanisation and mechanisation, every day has become more and more sedentary, especially in the cities. In the schools, children are no longer utilising the period for sports for any meaningful physical activity. Some schools don’t even have facilities for sporting activities.”
She, therefore, advocated for the need to make a positive lifestyle change and reduce the risk of developing lifestyle-related diseases.
World Diabetes Day, held every November 14 – created in 1991 by the International Diabetes Foundation (IDF) and World Health Organisation (WHO) in response to the escalating threat posed by diabetes – was officially recognised by United Nations (UN) in 2007.