Modelling Diabetes: The mortality burden

Modelling Diabetes: The mortality burden
Public Health Intelligence Occasional Bulletin No 8

Date of publication: March 2002

New Zealand is currently experiencing a ‘diabesity’ epidemic – an epidemic of obesity closely shadowed by a consequential epidemic of type 2 diabetes. Both epidemics are contributing to the worsening health inequality between Mäori and Pacific peoples and New Zealanders of European ethnic origin.

In response, the Government has designated diabetes and its major risk factors – obesity and physical inactivity – as priority health objectives in the New Zealand Health Strategy, launched by the Minister of Health, the Hon Annette King, on 14 December 2000.

A nutrition, physical activity and healthy weight strategy “Healthy Action – Healthy Eating” is currently being developed by the Ministry of Health under the umbrella of the New Zealand Health Strategy, aimed at achieving greater control over the major risk factors for diabetes.

Last year the Ministry launched the Diabetes 2000 initiative, aimed at improving the management of diabetes itself. This initiative seeks to enhance early intervention in the disease process, before the onset of micro- or macrovasular complications. It also encourages self-management, an important factor in reducing avoidable death and disability from any chronic disease. Finally, it promotes integrated care and better quality of care – including improvements in disease management information systems – through innovations such as local diabetes teams and free annual check-ups for people with diabetes.

Both the prevention of diabetes and the provision of health care for people living with diabetes require sound information about the current burden imposed on our society by this disease, and accurate forecasts of how this burden is likely to change in the future. Such information enables us to develop (and evaluate) evidence-based diabetes policy, health promotion and disease prevention programmes, and to plan and resource diabetes-related health services more effectively and efficiently than might otherwise be the case.

This report focuses on estimating the current fatal disease burden attributable to diabetes. Such estimates provide a baseline for planning. Estimates of the incidence of type 2 diabetes, which provide the foundation for forecasting the future burden of diabetes, are the subject of a separate report in this series of Ministry publications.

Comments on this report should be sent to:

Public Health Intelligence,
Ministry of Health,
PO Box 5013,
Wellington
or email martin_tobias@moh.govt.nz.

Document availability

This publication is not available in hard copy. It is only available on this website in PDF format below.

(PDF,787 kB)

This publication has been converted to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). Here is a link to information on downloading and viewing PDFs.