Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
An estimated 1 million people in Madagascar are diabetic, but only about half of them know it.
Finding the other half presents a major challenge for this large, island nation in which 80 percent of the population live in rural areas where few people have ever heard of this chronic and potentially deadly disease.
With the country?s underfunded public health sector barely functioning, this task has mainly fallen to the Madagascan Diabetes Association (A.MA.DIA.) which dispatches its doctors and nurses to the provinces to conduct blood sugar tests and raise awareness at fairs, schools and health centres.
?We have done this work for over five years now, and people are slowly starting to know more about the illness,? said Jean Marie Andriamanonga, coordinator of A.MA.DIA.
http://ewn.co.za/en/2012/07/23/Half a million undiagnosed diabetics.aspx
Finding the other half presents a major challenge for this large, island nation in which 80 percent of the population live in rural areas where few people have ever heard of this chronic and potentially deadly disease.
With the country?s underfunded public health sector barely functioning, this task has mainly fallen to the Madagascan Diabetes Association (A.MA.DIA.) which dispatches its doctors and nurses to the provinces to conduct blood sugar tests and raise awareness at fairs, schools and health centres.
?We have done this work for over five years now, and people are slowly starting to know more about the illness,? said Jean Marie Andriamanonga, coordinator of A.MA.DIA.
http://ewn.co.za/en/2012/07/23/Half a million undiagnosed diabetics.aspx