Health experts say that more and more Arabs living in the wealthy Gulf states are suffering lifestyle diseases, particularly obesity and diabetes, the AFP reported.
Governments in the area are now launching nutritional awareness programs to counteract the high-calorie fast-food culture that has gripped their desert nations.
Rapid economic growths due to windfall oil revenues are what Abdelrazzaq al-Madani, head of Dubai hospital and chairman of the Emirates Diabetes Society, blames for the rising obesity levels.
Madani told AFP that people have more sedentary jobs now compared to a harsher but more active lifestyle in the past.
He also noted a boom in restaurants offering foods from around the world, and high-calorie fast food.
He said that adolescents as young as 15 and 16 are developing diabetes, adding that there have been surges in obesity among younger children and especially teenagers.
Some 70 percent of adults and 12 percent of children in the UAE are overweight, while a fifth of the overweight children are at risk of developing obesity, according to official figures published this week.
But Madani said the increase in the incidence of diabetes is particularly worrying as it is a killer disease.
Heart attacks are one of the major killers in the United Arab Emirates and 80 percent of patients with diabetes die of heart attacks.
The latest official figures show that 19.6 percent of the UAE population of 6.4 million had diabetes in 2005.
Experts say that is the second highest rate in the world after the small South-Pacific island-nation of Nauru, where over 30 percent of the just over 13,000 population are diabetics.
Madani said he believes that if the same study were carried out today, there would be even higher numbers than in the previous results.
The UAE figure is expected to reach 28 percent in 2025, according to official data.
Figures from the UAE health ministry show that a third of patients in the country’s hospitals this month alone have diabetes, and that treatment of the disease costs the state some $200 million a year.
Doctors across the region told AFP that other Gulf states aren’t faring much better in their fight against the disease, with diabetes levels in Qatar at 15 percent, Bahrain at 14.3 percent and Oman at 13 percent.
In 2007, some 35 percent of children under 14 in the emirate were diabetic, compared to only seven percent 10 years earlier, according to Mariam al-Ali, a pediatrician at Hamad hospital in Qatar.
Health ministry official Mariam al-Jalahema said that a study conducted in 2006 on a sample of 1,769 people in Bahrain showed that 16.8 percent of women and 11.7 percent of men had diabetes.
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s official SPA news agency reported this month that 25 percent of the oil-rich kingdom’s over-30 population is diabetic.
Ahmad al-Shatti, the head of the diabetes awareness program in Kuwait, told AFP that one in every four Kuwaitis has diabetes.
This has led the UAE health ministry to launch a nationwide campaign to raise awareness about the health risks tied to obesity and diabetes.
The ministry has even joined forces with the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to fight obesity among children in a project that includes programs to educate mothers on healthy nutrition for their children and, in collaboration with the education ministry, encouraging school pupils to engage in sports and follow a healthy diet.
In Abdu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital, several schools have organized running races to promote the idea of a healthier lifestyle and one school canteen reportedly stopped selling junk food.
Similar awareness campaigns have also been launched in other Gulf states, including a check-up booth in malls as well as TV programs and educational seminars that discuss healthier alternatives.
Meanwhile, a condition known as “diabetic foot” which leads to dozens of foot amputations each year is also raising alarm in the Gulf area.
The condition is a direct result of diabetes that causes a lack of feeling in the foot due to damaged nerve endings and inadequate blood flow.
Untreated wounds and ulcers can lead to infection in the foot and amputation if the infection further deteriorates.
In March, Abdulaziz al-Gannass, a foot and ankle surgeon in Riyadh, told AFP that some 90 people had a foot amputated each month in the Saudi capital alone.
“People as young as 30 now come in for diabetes-linked foot amputations,” Gannass said.
The Emirates Physiotherapy Society held a week-long campaign in March with the motto “foot first” after learning that 49 foot amputations were carried out in the UAE last year, according to physiotherapist Amal al-Shamlan, head of the rehabilitation section at Al-Wasl hospital in Dubai.
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