Only TB kills more South Africans than diabetes, and only marginally so, but it’s taken a deadly pandemic to raise public awareness of a disease diagnosed in 4.6-million of us and millions more who don’t know they have it.
For professor Joel Dave, the pandemic has underscored an existing diabetes epidemic, and a positive spin-off is the expediting of what he hopes will become a new centre of excellence in diabetes at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. If all goes according to plan, the Diabetes Centre will open its doors in October.
Speaking to the Sunday Times this week, Joel Dave, the hospital’s head of endocrinology, said this “great clinical and financial burden on the health-care system” had been recognised by hospital CEO Dr Bhavna Patel, who allocated space for the centre.
He said it was well known there was a major diabetes problem but Covid had “further uncovered the poor management of diabetes” as well as “the vulnerability of people living with the disease, especially to infectious diseases”.
Data from the Western Cape shows that 43% of Covid-19 hospital admissions are diabetics, and of those who died, 23% had diabetes. He said the centre was intended to offer state-of-the-art care to patients in the public health system and to “reduce the high prevalence of diabetes complications”.
This would improve quality of life and reduce mortality. Patients would visit for diabetes care while others would receive training in the treatment of the disease, he said. The initial goal is to reach Western Cape residents and ultimately, the rest of the country and continent.
“We are ready to start renovating the space and hopefully as the third wave of Covid wanes, we will start and then be able to launch as close to early October as possible,” said Dave.
On World Diabetes Day last November, when SA was heading into its second wave, UN secretary-general António Guterres said that as “the number of people with diabetes surges, many are at increased risk of severe disease and death from Covid”.
According to Margot McCumisky, national manager of Diabetes SA, the pandemic may have raised public awareness of the plight of diabetes sufferers, “but it’s a little late for a lot of people who have died because the disease is neglected by a health system that does not focus on it as a priority”.
She said in her 30 years at Diabetes SA she had seen “lip service” paid to the disease, but the organisation had struggled to keep its doors open for lack of resources while cancer and HIV organisations got major support and “don’t have to beg for it”. She said she welcomed the centre at Groote Schuur because centres for diabetes are commonly only for those with medical insurance.
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