NEW YORK, Nov 13 — The number of people suffering from diabetes is surging, even as tens of millions cannot get the insulin they need, the World Health Organisation said yesterday.
And that number is expected to surge past half a billion by the end of this decade, WHO said yesterday. In a fresh report, WHO decried a betrayal of the solidarity showed by the Canadian researchers who discovered insulin 100 years ago. Most people living with diabetes have type 2, which is associated with obesity and other lifestyle factors and emerges in adults and increasingly among children.Some 63 million people with type 2 meanwhile also need the hormone, according to WHO estimates, but only about half of them can access it.
The report also lamented that the global market had at the start of this century shifted away from human insulin, which can be produced quite cheaply, to much pricier synthetic insulins.Tay pointed out that the price for the new insulin analogs could be multiple times higher, but clinical evidence showed that “human insulin usually works equally good ... for most people living with diabetes.”