New Insulin For Diabetics

Although diabetes is considered an ancient disease known since before thousands of years, scientists and doctors have written about it in Pharaonic, Greek and Chinese civilizations amongst others, Arab and Muslim doctors during the middle ages in Spain such as “Al-Razzi” and “Ibn Al-Azhar” who wrote the symptoms if this disease and ways of diagnoses, also mentioned in “Ibn Sina’s” books, but researches, doctors and statistical scientists confirm that, in all of human history, discussions of a wide spread disease in the way we witness in this era never happened (Especially recent years).

And according to new statistics there will be more than 300 million people infected with diabetes by 2020, thus making diabetes as a disease with steady acceleration and proliferation such as a growing epidemic.

Diabetes is known to be a disease that prevents the body to produce insulin hormone or benefit from it in an efficient way.

Insulin works by inserting sugar inside the cell, and in the case or disabling or weakening its process cells will be denied sugar (Energy) thus accumulating sugar in the blood stream which will result into complications in different body organ functions, such as the eyes, where sugar is considered the main factor for blindness for patients between 20 and 70 years old, and half of recently diagnosed kidney failures is a result of diabetes, and the percentage increases of getting infected with heart diseases in diabetics by as much as four times the chances, and more than 8% of diabetic suffer from Erectile Dysfunction, and where most of the patients suffering from damage in the fine nerves of their limbs, which in many cases result to limb amputation.

And Previously we used to divide patients in to two types; the first type is diabetic children and youth under 40 years of age caused by the complete lack of insulin due to the total damage for cells that produces insulin to the pancreas, those patients cannot survive without insulin.

The second type is the 90% of diabetics, which was known before to affect people above 40 years of age due to many factors and elements such as Genetics, obesity and old age, which can be treated with medication even if a huge percentage needs some insulin for treatment.

But this definition has started to change due to the increased percentage of children infected with the second type of the disease (according to the previous definition).

With horrifying statistics (CDC) the percentage of diabetics above 40 has increased by 40% during the past 8 years, and where 70% increase was in diabetics under 40 years of age (30 -40 years), which makes us look differently at the second type as a disease of old age (as was previously thought) but now belongs to the youth diseases as well.

Diabetes and its complications costs the U.S alone 98 billion dollars annually, where all cancerous diseases combined with their complications costs them 107 billion dollars a year, knowing that the percentage of diabetics in America does not exceed 8% and where in some Arabic countries it exceeds 30%.

One of the reasons why this steady spread of diabetes is the increase of obesity percentages, knowing for a fact that obesity is more increasing in the Arabic world than it is in the U.S (World Health Organization Statistics).

And Americans have warned diabetics and started awareness and education campaigns years ago in a large scale, and has multiplied the support for research and studies in diabetes.

And where different institutes joined together to accomplish this goal, and from those supporters is the mailing system that allocated a postal stamp for diabetics to motivate and encourage Americans to ask and question about the disease, the post stamp read “Know more about diabetes”.

Joslin diabetes center ‘a Harvard affiliate’ and where I work at, was chosen to be the place to celebrate the dedication and allocation of this new stamp which will work through all of America and beyond and fall in the hands of hundreds and millions of people, the celebration (Friday the 16^th of March 2001) was attended by University presidents, hospitals, research centers and from politicians, writers, and high society members under an intense media coverage, and where many lectures took place in order to bring up the level of awareness to this disease.

Many may wonder: what is the relation between the ministry of post and raising the level of health awareness? And the answer is, our conscious communities work towards collaborating to accomplish their goals as one complete community, dealing with it as one body, if one part aches and complains other parts of the body will surrender to it with fever and alert.