Health crisis forced on Maori: Turia

By ANGELA GREGORY and NZPA

The epidemic of diabetes among Maori is the result of lifestyle changes that have been forced upon them, Associate Maori Affairs Minister Tariana Turia says.

Ms Turia told an international conference on diabetes and indigenous people in Christchurch yesterday that the health and wellbeing of Maori was tied to their rivers, mountains, lands, lakes, forests and seas.

Maori and Pacific Islanders have among the world's highest rates of diabetes - a global epidemic that kills nearly seven times more people than previously thought.

Ms Turia said: "In Aotearoa, Maori have one of the highest death rates for diabetes in the world and are twice as likely to have been diagnosed with diabetes than non-Maori.

"The epidemic of diabetes is the result of lifestyle changes that have been forced upon our people.

"It is a disease that has had a devastating effect on our whanau, hapu and iwi because it affects all the major organs of the body."

Ms Turia said treatment of Maori had not been successful because the focus had been on individuals rather than their whanau.

An indigenous health workforce was vital to maintaining a healthy indigenous population, she said.

The Government had taken a new approach by committing itself to working with whanau, hapu and iwi to reverse the high incidence of diseases such as diabetes.

"At the heart of what this Government and I are working for is the development of our whanau.

"The ability of whanau to carry out their economic and social development plan relies on their ability to be and stay healthy."

The World Health Organisation director of diabetes services, Dr Hilary King, said new research showed diabetes accounted for 4 million deaths worldwide each year.

Previous estimates had put the global mortality figure at 600,000.

In his keynote address at the conference yesterday, Dr King said the dramatic upward revision of diabetes deaths followed the "indirect calculation" of the underlying cause of related illnesses like heart disease.

Dr King said indigenous people were most at risk because they seemed to have a genetic susceptibility arising from once-small and isolated populations.

"There could have been a genetic usefulness in helping them store energy in periods when food was not so readily available."

Another theory was that the pancreas of a foetus did not develop properly when food supplies were poor.

Dr King said diabetes had been around for thousands of years, but modern diets had vastly increased its incidence.

Diabetes was once considered a rich person's disease, as the wealthy overindulged in high carbohydrate and fatty diets.

But over the past 20 years or so diabetes had emerged as a poor person's disease, reflecting a lack of education, with limited access to leisure exercise and healthy food.

Dr King said Who statistics indicated there were 150 million people with diabetes worldwide, a figure that would double in the next 25 years.

"It ranks as a very important disease this century ... a priority problem."

Dr King said it was an expensive problem because of the high costs of managing the complications, which included blindness, nerve damage and vascular disease.

Countries with the highest number of diabetics were India, China and the United States.

But on a proportional population basis, the Pacific Island peoples, including Maori, and Native Americans, ranked among the worse affected.