By
Alexander Nyarko Yeboah, GNA
Tema Dec. 9, GNA – A
former Young Leader of the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), has
launched a project to educate persons living with diabetes.
The project, ‘Bloom
with Diabetes’ is also to create awareness of the existence of Diabetes and
bring together persons with the condition so they could learn together and
fight better knowing that there are others who share their fate.
In an interview with
the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on Saturday at Premium Diabetes Education and Care
Centre (PDECC), Lashibi, the Director of the Project, Ms. Abigail Baaba Boison,
informed that the education would help them learn self-management skills to
improve upon the care to reduce diabetes complications.
“My vision is to see
no child dies of diabetes; I think we deserve to live and live on,” Ms. Boison
said with enthusiasm.
Ms. Boison indicated
that living with diabetes was not easy, “but now I can say I live a normal life
because I have been trained and have learnt a lot; the difference between me and
someone who doesn’t have diabetes is through checking to know my sugar level
and eating healthily.”
She observed that
Diabetes could affect anybody and so the need for everybody to know his or her
status “because it was not a curse to live with diabetes and that one would be
fine if one goes by the rules in managing the condition.”
The Facilitator of
the project, Madam Gifty Dede, informed that diabetes was a metabolic condition
in which the body could not process the sugars that came through the food one
ate “because the Pancreas was either not producing the hormone Insulin, not
producing enough, or that the Insulin produced is not active.”
Madam Dede said the
person with the condition suffered a lot because the Insulin responsible for
transporting the sugar from the blood to the body for the body to utilize to
produce energy was not available, and with poor management came increased sugar
level in the blood and that too much sugar in the blood for very long time
could destroy every part of the body.
“But if you manage
it well, your chances are like any other person. It needs a little more work;
one should be able to estimate what one is eating and estimate ones medication
and how much activity one is going to do
in order to get to the normal blood sugars,” she educated.
Madam Dede, who was
also a Clinical Nurse Consultant, Diabetes Education, observed that it was
necessary to talk about diabetes because people were usually silent on the
subject indicating that people living with Type two condition could go for a
long time without knowing they had it, “and so they get used to the symptoms
and make excuses for all that, so by the time the body gets sick it’s a bit
really late.”
She added that, “We
want people to realize that it is there, it is silent and as you grow older,
either with a family history of diabetes, too much alcohol intake, too much
smoking and inactivity, the risk is higher, and the higher the risk factors,
the higher the chances that you could have diabetes.”
In encouraging good
eating habits to better manage diabetes, Madam Dede said, “Culturally we
entertain with food, and when it comes to food it could be very challenging;
sometimes it is the type of food, sometimes it’s the amount of food, sometimes
it’s the times you eat that food, therefore the need to eat regularly so we
don’t release too much sugar into the blood at a time.”
GNA
