China has overtaken India as the country with the highest population of diabetics. It has some 90 million diabetics, while many cases remain undiagnosed. Recently the government has launched a campaign to screen for the disease among 10,000 people.
Chen Zhe has more.
Apart from diabetes screening, the Blue Light Initiative will hopefully conduct diabetes-related education for 100 million people and establish one hundred community units to manage the disease by the end of this year.
Advocates of the campaign hope to encourage the whole society to fight against the disease by organizing these activities.
Yang Wenying, Director of the Department of Endocrinology at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, says promoting the public's awareness of the disease is key to slow down the epidemic.
"It's difficult to diagnose the disease due to its subtle symptoms. The public, including diabetic patients, don't pay enough attention to it. So the government should organize local hospitals and communities to educate people about the disease."
Diabetes kills some 3.8 million people each year. The total number of the diabetes-diagnosed in 2010 reached 280 million in the world.
In China, the size of the diabetic population has almost doubled since 2000, and nearly 150 million more are well on their way to developing it.
Yang Wenying explains the situation behind the boom.
"A growing number of the ageing population, a larger obese society as well as the rapid urbanization are the main causes of the epidemic. Also we adopted new measures to screen diabetes so that more cases were found."
People with a family history, people aged over forty and those suffering high blood pressure and obesity are most vulnerable to diabetes.
The doctor suggests that the public do medical checks more often and exercise more to prevent the disease.
In the meantime, diabetes is as prevalent in rural areas as in urban areas. The population at the stage of pre-diabetes is even higher in the countryside than in developed regions.
However, Professor Weng Jianping with the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University says China is ill-equipped to deal with this pandemic in rural areas.
"There's a lack of medical resources in the countryside, especially disease educators. It is in need of medical workers familiar with the disease to popularize diabetic knowledge and to treat the patients."
In 2006, The United Nations designated every November 14th as the World Diabetes Day.
Blue light will light up landmarks globally on the day to arouse people's attention towards diabetes prevention. Some famed Chinese landmarks will for the first time beam blue light to convey that message on November 14th this year.
