Australia’s healthcare system is in danger of being overburdened by an accelerating rise in the prevalence of diabetes.
Around 3.1 million Australians – or 8% of the projected population – will be living with diabetes by 2050, a new Commonwealth Parliamentary Report has stated.
The report, from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport, investigated causes, treatments, links with obesity and physical inactivity, as well as the broader impacts of diabetes on Australia’s health system and economy.
It found three factors – bad diet, obesity, and physical inactivity – were major factors contributing to the crisis.
Physical activity has been recognised for years as a powerful instrument in the prevention, management and successful treatment of diabetes mellitus, outcomes to which many once-diabetic bike riders attest.
Nonetheless, the health care system has never seriously mobilised to package and deploy exercise as a weapon in this war against a disease that has such debilitating impacts on health at both the personal level, and that of the national economy.
The committee found that while new treatments were becoming available to delay the onset of type 2 diabetes, they were expensive, required continuing treatment, were in short supply and may have significant side effects.
"The primary aim must be prevention and it is very important that every strategy possible is used as part of a comprehensive preventative response’” the report says. "This will require an all of Government approach involving local, State and Federal Governments.”
Some of the policy recommendations include improving access to healthy foods, using a reformulation levy to decrease consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, limiting advertising of high sugar and highly processed foods, particularly to children, better urban planning to encourage increased physical activity and improved educational resources for our children about the dangers of diabetes.
A key recommendation was that: "The Australian government, in consultation and cooperation with state and territory governments, develops a best-practice framework to tackle the problem of obesogenic environments, including through better urban planning and the development of physical activity initiatives and supports efforts to increase access to regular exercise in schools and neighbourhoods as a matter of urgency."
COMMENT: Most of the elements of such a framework already exist with active transport policies, bike plans and existing ride to school programs across state and local government, but they are hobbled by lack of funding and feeble political leadership.
The annual cost impact of the disease is currently estimated at $20 billion a year, and is rising rapidly. Getting those costs under control is indeed an urgent matter, and one that every bike rider has a solution to.
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