Handling Diabetes In The Workplace

Handling diabetes in the workplace

There are around 4.5 million people living with diabetes in the UK and approximately 700 diagnoses per day, the equivalent of one person every two minutes. In the last 20 years, the number of people diagnosed with diabetes in the UK has more than doubled and it is estimated that there are around 1.1 million people in the UK who have diabetes but have not been diagnosed.
This week is Diabetes week which aims to raise awareness of the condition, and we, therefore, thought it would be a good opportunity to consider an employer’s obligations and how they can help employees who have this lifelong condition.
Is diabetes a disability?
“Disability” is defined in the Equality Act 2010 as a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on a person’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.
There are 2 types of diabetes: type 1, which is an autoimmune condition affecting around 10% of sufferers and type 2, which is caused by a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors and affects around 90% of sufferers.
There is no straightforward answer as to whether diabetes amounts to a disability for the purposes of the Equality Act. Each case would be assessed on its own facts, and would focus on the impact the condition has on the employee’s ability to carry out day to day activities and whether a treatment or correction or a coping or avoidance strategy was applied to manage it.
If a condition is treated or corrected, guidance suggests the effect of that treatment or correction should be ignored when assessing the condition a Continue reading

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Update: Belgian Biotech Starts Human Trials for a Potential Type 1 Diabetes Cure

Update (15/11/2017): Imcyse has officially started recruiting patients to test its therapy for type 1 diabetes. The clinical trial will recruit up to 40 patients across 15 European centers, and the first patient has already enrolled at the Steno Diabetes Center in Copenhagen.
Originally published on 30/05/2017
Imcyse will run its first clinical trial testing a specific immunotherapy that could finally provide a cure to autoimmune diseases.
Imcyse, a Belgian biotech spun out from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2010, just announced it has received approval from Belgian and British regulatory authorities to launch a Phase Ib trial in patients with type 1 diabetes. The study is backed with funding from the EU through the EXALT program, which has a budget of €6M over 5 years to promote the development of a cure for type 1 diabetes.
The trial, run in collaboration with the French Inserm, will be run in 18 sites across Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, and the UK. It will be the first study in humans testing Imcyse’s immunotherapy technology, which is aimed at stopping the destruction of insulin-producing beta pancreatic cells in patients diagnosed with the disease within 6 months before the trial, when not all beta cells have yet been eliminated. Results are expected at the end of 2018.
Imcyse develops Imotopes, modified peptides that induce cytolytic CD4 T cells to kill other immune cells involved in the destruction of a specific target, in this case insulin-producing cells, without affecting any other functions of the immune system. The peptides are composed of an e Continue reading

Does Paratuberculosis in Milk Trigger Type 1 Diabetes?

For an exploration of other possibilities as to why cow’s milk consumption is linked to this autoimmune destruction of insulin production see Does Casein in Milk Trigger Type 1 Diabetes? and Does Bovine Insulin in Milk Trigger Type 1 Diabetes?
If it’s in the milk, what about the meat? That’s the subject of my next two videos in this three-part series, Meat Consumption & the Development of Type 1 Diabetes and Does Paratuberculosis in Meat Trigger Type 1 Diabetes?
But if we don’t drink milk, what about our bone health? See my video Is Milk Good for Our Bones?
If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here. Continue reading

World Diabetes Day: Number of Indians with diabetes likely to double in next decade

Asians have a 2–4-times higher risk of type 2 diabetes than white Europeans.
With a prediabetes prevalence of 10.3% among adults, people with diabetes in India are likely to more than double in the next decade from the current 70 million, a study by the country’s apex research organisation has estimated.
The prevalence of prediabetes — also known as “impaired glucose tolerance” and a precursor to diabetes — is 1.4 times higher than the diabetes prevalence of 7.3%, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research-IndiaB study of 57,117 adults over 20 years from 14 states and the Union Territory (UT) of Chandigarh.
Around 47.3% of India’s 70 million diabetics are undiagnosed and do not know they have high blood glucose levels that, if left untreated, lead to complications such as blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, stroke and foot amputation, the study found.
Diabetes emerged as India’s seventh biggest cause of early death in 2016, up from 11th in 2005, shows data from Institute of Health Metrics & Evaluation .
Diabetes prevalence is higher in affluent states and UTs like Chandigarh, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, but pre-diabetes prevalence, which ranged from 6% in Mizoram to 14.7% in Tripura, was high across states irrespective of income.
Even a state like Bihar with a low diabetes prevalence of 4.3% had 10% people with prediabetes, indicating that diabetes cases would shoot up in the state over the next decade.
Data from 15 states from the ongoing INdia DIABetes(INDIAB)study to track diabetes and prediabetes prevalence threw light on the overall prese Continue reading

Juvenile Diabetes and Vaccination: New Evidence for a Connection

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In the fall of 1997, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that the number of Americans living with diabetes has skyrocketed in the past 40 years with a record sixfold increase in this chronic disease since 1958. It is estimated that nearly 16 million Americans are suffering with diabetes and 5 million more may have it but not know it.
Over the past four decades, intensive national mass vaccination campaigns have dramatically increased vaccination rates among American children who now are getting 34 doses of 10 different viral and bacterial vaccines before they enter kindergarten. Recent published data in the medical literature suggest increasing numbers of childhood vaccines may be playing a role in the big jump in the number of cases of juvenile diabetes.
What is diabetes?
The most frequent kind of diabetes is diabetes mellitus, a chronic degenerative disease caused when the pancreas either fails to produce a protein hormone called insulin or the body's cells are resistant to the action of insulin. Without insulin, the body cannot process and use glucose, a blood sugar which is a chief source of energy for living organisms and is found in certain foods like fruit. If the body's cells have become resistant to insulin, glucose cannot be moved from the blood to cells in order to be transformed into energy.
There are two types of diabetes mellitus: Type I, called insulin-dependent juvenile diabetes, and Type II, called adult-onset diabetes.
Type I Diabetes - Type I diabetes, also called insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM), occurs mostly in children and y Continue reading