Diabetes is a prevalent condition in Canada, with roughly one in three Canadians diagnosed with some form of Diabetes or pre-Diabetes. This means that as of 2019, roughly 12.5 million Canadians have Diabetes. This includes Type-1 and Type-2.
According to an online article posted by Diabetes Canada, Diabetes accounts for 30% of strokes, 40% of heart attacks, 50% of kidney failures and 70% of non-traumatic amputations that occur annually in Canada (https://www.diabetes.ca/media-room/press-releases/one-in-three-canadians-is-living-with-diabetes-or-prediabetes,-yet-knowledge-of-risk-and-complicatio)
I had someone recently ask me if there are any countries that have a higher rate of Diabetes than others. I did a reasonable amount of digging and research, but I wasn’t quite able to find anything definitive. The World Health Organization’s website had a spreadsheet that showed prevalence of Diabetes in different countries, but when I landed on Canada, the numbers didn’t seem to add up to what’s reported on Diabetes-related websites and Statistics Canada.
So, what country has the highest rate of Diabetes? According to a site called Statista, China is the country with the highest prevalence of Diabetes at 116.4 million people with some form of the disease (https://www.statista.com/statistics/281082/countries-with-highest-number-of-diabetics/).
According to a page on dLife.com, a ranking of the top 20 countries with the highest prevalence of Diabetes shows a small island country called Tokelau as the top country with a prevalence of 96%. I had to look this place up, since I’d never heard of it. And Tokelau, as it turns out, is a small group of atoll islands in the South Pacific Ocean. (https://dlife.com/20-countries-with-the-highest-diabetes-rates/)
I’m not sure how confident I am in these numbers, as I usually prefer to lean on verifiable sources to confirm these types of statistics. But one of the things that was mentioned in the sites I searched is that a higher percentage of Diabetes prevalence seems to affect small island countries where malnutrition and bad food labelling is a measurable problem. This would seem to suggest that the result lean more towards Type-2. Long story short, I didn’t find anything definitive, which disappoints me…
The World Health Organization states that there are 422 million people world-wide living with Diabetes as of 2014 (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/diabetes) and that was the latest information. 2014! Who knows how high that number has risen in the past six years.
Maybe I’m losing my touch and my ability to research and look up information is slipping. But I can certainly confirm that Diabetes is a very real presence in most countries around the world. It usually causes a strain on the health industry and contributes to a significant number of deaths every year. ☯
The Blogging Buddhist 