Diabetes: Tailored Prevention Messaging

Gregory Campbell Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered tailored prevention messaging for diabetes.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. It is good to see a group of MPs here who have made the effort and taken the time to come to a Thursday afternoon debate. I am pleased to see the Minister in her place. As she knows, I am particularly fond of her as a Minister and look forward to her response. I have given her a copy of my speech, so we can perhaps get some helpful answers. I thank her in advance for that. I am also pleased to see the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), who is always here, and other right hon. and hon. Members who regularly come to diabetes debates.

I am particularly glad to see the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who chairs the all-party parliamentary group for diabetes, of which I am the vice-chair. We have many things in common. Not only are we both type 2 diabetic—I make that clear at the beginning—but we are faithful fans of Leicester City football club. We have followed it for years, and it is third in the premier league. Tomorrow night, as I understand, it plays Southampton away, where I hope Brendan Rodgers will do the best for us again.

We are here to discuss diabetes. I have been a type 2 diabetic for 12 to 14 years or thereabouts. I was a big fat pudding, to tell the truth—I was 17 stone and getting bigger. I enjoyed my Chinese and my two bottles of Coke five nights a week. I was probably diabetic for at least 12 months before I knew I was. When I look back, I can see the symptoms, but I never knew then what the symptoms were—I was not even sure what a diabetic was. When the doctor told me that I was a diabetic, he said that there were two things to know. They always tell people the good news and the bad news, so I said, “Give us the good news first.” He said, “The good news is that you can sort this out. The bad news is that you’re a diabetic.”

I went on diet control and stayed on it for four years. When I talked to my doctor again, he told me that the disease would get progressively worse. Even after four years of diet control and dropping down to 13 stone—about the weight I am now, although I am a wee bit lighter at the moment, because of not being that well for the last couple of months—I went on to metformin tablets. A few years later, they were no longer working, so he increased the dosage. He also said, as doctors often do, “You might have a wee bit of bother with your blood pressure. You don’t really need a blood pressure tablet, but take one just in case.” I said, “Well, if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is”, but he said, “By the way, when you take it, you can’t stop it”, so it was not just about blood pressure.

I say all that because diabetes is about more than just sugar level control. It affects the arteries, blood, kidneys, circulation, eyesight and many other parts of the body. If people do not control it and do not look after it, it is a disease that will take them out of this world. That is the fact of diabetes.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. He is an assiduous attender; he attends so much that I think the Speaker of the House said on one occasion that he thought my hon. Friend actually slept in the Chamber. He is alluding to his personal circumstances, but I and other hon. Members have raised the issue of juveniles and underage individuals who have an obesity problem that, over time, begins the process of type 2 diabetes. Although we need to tackle the problems in adulthood that he is raising, we also need to tackle them among children.

[Jim Shannon]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The figures that he and I have indicate that almost 100,000 people over the age of 17 live with diabetes in Northern Ireland, out of a population of over-17s of 1.6 million. We know it is more than that and that there are a lot of diabetics under 17, so he is right to bring that up. Northern Ireland has more children who are type 1 diabetic in comparison with the population than anywhere else in the United Kingdom.