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“Diabetes experts say Canada could prevent another million type 2 diabetes diagnoses in the next decade if Ottawa helps to fund something it lacks now: a national diabetes strategy.
Officials with Diabetes Canada were joined by Liberal MP Sonia Sidhu in the National Press Theatre Tuesday morning to ask the federal government to earmark $150 million in the next budget to fund a diabetes initiative over seven years.
The charity said its Diabetes 360 strategy, modelled after HIV/AIDS targets, would establish clear milestones to prevent and manage the disease, which affects about five million Canadians.
The strategy would focus on factors contributing to the disease’s rise in Canada, such as poverty, poor food security and unhealthy living.
“Canada is facing a diabetes epidemic. Since 2000, the number of Canadians with diabetes has doubled,” said Dr. Jan Hux, president and CEO of Diabetes Canada.
“A 20 year old in Canada now faces a 50/50 risk of developing diabetes. For First Nations people, that risk is 80 per cent.””
– CBC News, Diabetes Canada warns of ‘epidemic,’ calls for national strategy.
““There’s quite a bit of evidence that children who attended residential schools across Canada, in different provinces and territories and over many decades of the 20th century, were very hungry,” said Tracey Galloway, professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and one of the study’s co-authors.
“What we found is that those children experienced lifelong consequences to their health, and in fact their children and grandchildren bear the biological costs of that hunger and malnutrition.”
Galloway says children who suffer from malnutrition in their youth go on to have a body that wants to accumulate fat reserves more quickly than it accumulates muscle. As a result, these children are at a higher risk of obesity, insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes, and this increased risk is passed to their children and grandchildren.”
– Global News, Residential school system contributed to current First Nations diabetes epidemic: study.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
