Diabetes gets high on citys kids

CHENNAI: There’s no escaping it this year. Twenty years after November 14 began being observed as World Diabetes Day across the Pacific, a dire need to make people aware that diabetes is on a rampage in India, Tamil Nadu and specifically in Chennai, has arrived. While it can be argued that overall the numbers of ‘diabetes-affected’ people in 2011 has not really set the alarm bells off, experts say that there is much cause for worry. Dr V Mohan, who heads Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Speciality Centre, says that the incidence of Type-II Diabetes in people under 20 has seen an alarming rise in the last five years. “From a situation where it was almost impossible to find anyone under 30 with Type-II Diabetes, in our centre alone we have seen almost a five- fold increase over the past decade or less,” he reveals. The reason is a mantra that we have heard as often as we have hit pot-holes in Chennai: Lifestyle, diet and obesity, says Dr Mohan.Add to this the fact that juvenile diabetes has become a rising problem in the country and we have a very large problem that is scarcely being addressed. “According to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, it is estimated that there are over one million children with Juvenile Diabetes (Type-I) in India,” says Dr Vijay Viswanathan, MD of MV Hospital for Diabetes in Royapuram. The facts get scarier: annually, out of 27,000 children aged 12-14 who die across the world, 12,000  are in India. “This is to give you a picture of how many juvenile diabetics in Tamil Nadu are insulin-dependent for life,” he said at the launch of the Changing Diabetes in Children (CdiC) programme in the city.Spare a thought also for neo-natal diabetics or the slim minority of diabetics who are found to have the disease before they reach the age of six months. Forty of them will be felicitated at Dr Mohan’s centre today, even as the buzz around World Diabetes Day dies down. Will the number of child diabetics also decline soon? That’s a question best left to parents and policy-makers, he says. “What happened in the USA and China in a decade is happening here even faster,” he adds. An intervention like replacing soda machines in schools with water dispensers helped curb obesity in the States; perhaps killing the potato chips in the school canteen might do the trick here?