Type two diabetes takes toll on Pacific

Transcript

Nearly half of the island countries and territories in the Pacific island region have brought in taxes to curb the islands' soaring rates of obesity and diabetes.

Doctors and other health experts says the rate of type two diabetes is at a crisis point.

Lucy Smith reports.

Type two diabetes is caused mainly by eating unhealthy foods, and by being overweight which limits the amount of insulin that can be produced.

A doctor working with diabetes sufferers in Fiji Jone Hawea says around 700 amputations a year are performed in Fiji because of diabetes.

He says the surgical department he works at is just at the bottom of the cliff, and they are removing limbs off people as young as 30.

We're anticipating low productivity levels in the not so near future. It is a depressing environment to be working in. To see your own people and especially when you follow up in the clinics and they come back and say their wives and their husbands have run away they couldn't take the load. We now have a dedicated operating theatre just for the surgical management of diabetic foot infections.

The World Health Organisation's  non communicable diseases officer Wendy Snowdon says type 2 diabetes rates in the region are up to three times higher than the global average.

She says the high rates won't be going down any time soon and the main focus is prevention.

If we can stop the new cases coming in, and support those who are already diabetic then over the next 20 years we may be able to see a reduction in the levels. But obviously the people who are already diabetic are going to stay diabetic so we won't be able to reduce the actual prevalence in the short term.
 

Professor Stephen McGarvey from Brown University in the US studies type 2 diabetes in Samoa and American Samoa.

He says imported sugary, fatty food changed traditional lifestyles because people didn't have to gather or hunt for food anymore.

Household income was increased because migrant Samoans were sending money back home. They don't have to physically work as long or as hard, in the plantation, outside, in the reef or in the deeper ocean. You had this combination of not enough calories being burnt, an increase in calories a lot of it from not very high quality nutritional food. 

Professor McGarvey says the governments in the region are heading the right direction but more permanent solutions are needed.

The ultimate longer term solutions are how to educate people how to encourage physical activity, local farming, eating quality foods things like that. A point of purchase on sales tax on sugar, sweetened beverages - like Mexico is trying to do. Those may be some of the longer terms ways of doing it.

French Polynesia, Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Fiji, and Nauru have a tax on either sugary beverages or food items.