“When we project the increase in diabetes and the costs associated with it, the Mexican health system will be overwhelmed. It can’t be paid for. By the year 2020, it will be catastrophic. By 2030, it faces collapse,” Dr. Abelardo Avila Curiel said.
With each bite into a greasy taco and slurp of a sugary drink, Mexico hurtles toward what health experts predict will be a public health crisis from diabetes-related disease.
A fifth of all Mexican women and more than a quarter of men are believed to be at risk for diabetes now. It’s already the nation’s No. 1 killer, taking some 70,000 lives a year, far more than gangster violence.
Public health experts blame changes in lifestyle that have made Mexicans more obese than anywhere else on Earth except the United States. They attribute changes to powerful snack and soft drink industries, newly sedentary ways of living and a genetic heritage susceptible to diabetes, a chronic, life-threatening illness.
The results are evident at public hospitals, where those needing treatment for diabetes-related illness, such as blindness and kidney dialysis, clamor for help.
“The first time we came, we had to wait 12 days for my husband to get dialysis,” said Marta Remigio Jasso, who spoke on the grounds of the General Hospital of Mexico, a public unit of the Secretariat of Health. “I slept under my husband’s hospital bed.”
Already, some 150,000 Mexicans receive kidney dialysis, but nearly the same number are denied treatment for lack of insurance, said Dr. Abelardo Avila Curiel, a physician and expert in population studies at one of Mexico’s most prestigious medical centers, the Salvador Zubiran National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition.
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