Your Health

The Other Pandemic Part III; Media giants in the U.S and Canada are all shooting at the wrong target

W. Gifford-Jones MD & Diana Gifford-Jones

November 18, 2021

BY W. GIFFORD- JONES MD & DIANA GIFFORD-JONES

Last week’s column claimed, “Wars are too important to be left to generals,” and “The type 2 diabetes pandemic is too important to be left to doctors.” We asked whether there was a difference between millions of North Americans dying quickly of COVID-19 and millions of people dying slowly of diabetes. In this week’s column, we challenge media outlets to help doctors fight this other pandemic that is having a disastrous effect on our health care system.

Consider what’s happened for twenty months now. Broadcasters in North America could hardly wait to tell us night after night about the daily number of deaths from COVID-19.

But what they have not mentioned is that 1 in 10 North Americans now have Type 2-diabetes – in effect, that people are sick and many more are soon to follow. Unfortunately, the majority are not aware of the terrible future they face as diabetes takes its toll.

We should not need to spoon feed the overwhelming mountains of data to journalists. The evidence is in plain sight to all. A visit to any supermarket quickly shows what’s happening to society. Overweight and morbidly obese shoppers are buying: cheaper, easier, poor-quality food heavily marketed by powerful producers.

Obesity has been setting the stage for Type 2-diabetes for decades. The blunt fact is that sixty-five years ago 95% of diabetes was due to being born with defective genes and just 5% to obesity and lifestyle factors. Today, what a reversal! Just 5% of diabetes is due to defective genes and 95% to obesity.

This is not an act of God. Defective genes do not proliferate so speedily, but human behaviour and faulty diets have changed over the years. Few people are getting enough exercise.

Why ask for the media’s help? Doctors have been successful finding cures for diseases in the past. But this current challenge goes well beyond the capabilities of the medical profession. Despite a wealth of medical literature, hundreds of books and weight loss programs, and the tragic consequences of obesity, the problem still escalates.

Some predict that by 2050, rather than 1 in 10 people with Type 2-diabetes, it will be 1 in 3! Since the cost of care is now $230 billion annually, this will trigger the most devastating economic and health wreck the world has ever witnessed.

Can it be solved?

The medical profession cannot do it alone. But if the media issued an urgent alert, even a fraction of the magnitude of the COVID coverage, there might be hope.

Since COVID struck, the media has been unrelenting in hammering out news of the more than 600,000 U.S. citizens alone who have died. But according to the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S., there are 34 million diabetics in the U.S. and another 88 million have pre-diabetes. The World Health Organization reports that diabetes is three times more deadly than COVID-19. Worldwide 463 million people have diabetes and about 4.2 million die of it every year.

Media giants in the U.S and Canada are all shooting at the wrong target. There’s a larger killer in our midst. Unlike the COVID-19 virus which will eventually fade away or be managed, type 2 diabetes will continue to creep forward, causing millions to suffer from amputations, blindness, kidney failure and other severe complications day after day, gradually killing far more and costing all of us dearly.

Will big media houses accept the challenge to cover this other pandemic? We want to know.

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Written By W. Gifford-Jones MD & Diana Gifford-Jones

Dr. W. Gifford-Jones, MD is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Harvard Medical School. He trained in general surgery at Strong Memorial Hospital, University of Rochester, Montreal General Hospital, McGill University and in Gynecology at Harvard. His storied medical career began as a general practitioner, ship’s surgeon, and hotel doctor. For more than 40 years, he specialized in gynecology, devoting his practice to the formative issues of women’s health. In 1975, he launched his weekly medical column that has been published by national and local Canadian and U.S. newspapers. Today, the readership remains over seven million. His advice contains a solid dose of common sense and he never sits on the fence with controversial issues. He is the author of nine books including, “The Healthy Barmaid”, his autobiography “You’re Going To Do What?”, “What I Learned as a Medical Journalist”, and “90+ How I Got There!” Many years ago, he was successful in a fight to legalize heroin to help ease the pain of terminal cancer patients. His foundation at that time donated $500,000 to establish the Gifford-Jones Professorship in Pain Control and Palliative Care at the University of Toronto Medical School. At 93 years of age he rappelled from the top of Toronto’s City Hall (30 stories) to raise funds for children with a life-threatening disease through the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Diana Gifford-Jones, the daughter of W. Gifford-Jones, MD, Diana has extensive global experience in health and healthcare policy. Diana is Special Advisor with The Aga Khan University, which operates 2 quaternary care hospitals and numerous secondary hospitals, medical centres, pharmacies, and laboratories in South Asia and Africa. She worked for ten years in the Human Development sectors at the World Bank, including health policy and economics, nutrition, and population health. For over a decade at The Conference Board of Canada, she managed four health-related executive networks, including the Roundtable on Socio-Economic Determinants of Health, the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management, the Canadian Centre for Environmental Health, and the Centre for Health System Design and Management. Her master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government included coursework at Harvard Medical School. She is also a graduate of Wellesley College. She has extensive experience with Canadian universities, including at Carleton University, where she was the Executive Director of the Global Academy. She lived and worked in Japan for four years and speaks Japanese fluently. Diana has the designation as a certified Chartered Director from The Directors College, a joint venture of The Conference Board of Canada and McMaster University. She has recently published a book on the natural health philosophy of W. Gifford-Jones, called No Nonsense Health – Naturally!

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