As food prices in the country skyrocketed, patients grappling with managing diabetes in Bauchi have decried the rising cost of food supplements they eat to help keep them healthy.
LEADERSHIP Weekend reports that eating prescribed diets remains a stumbling block in their bids to cure the ailment for most Diabetes patients.
While Bauchi Diabetespatients made strides to maintain the ailment by taking prescribed drugs, which in most cases, were within reach, yet another concern is the stigmatization that the lagger society dished out to Diabetes patients.
“Am facing a lot of challenges. The biggest one is that I can not eat the type of food I want because I am Diabetics. I can only eat a certain category of food. The daily exercise I do is also annoying even though it helped in slowing down the sugar level,” Maman Sadiya, a resident of Misau who has been battling the ailment over the past 10 years said.
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She said her survival depends on the availability of Hungry Rice, commonly called Acha. But at the moment, the food brand has become costlier and scarce owing to increase demand for it.
“My prescribed medication is not difficult and costly but the most is the food combination we are eating.
“Shops selling Acha are not enough. You may walk a long distance before you get to the shop and sometimes it will not be available. So our life depends on vegetables as if we are rabbits.
“I feel completely defeated in my drive to maintain diabetes because of how people in the neighbourhood condemn me to death. This pains more than the disease itself,” Sadiya Yunusa, a Diabetes patient said.
Another patient, Malam Haruna has the inability to eat what he desires and keeps hunting him, adding that this has worsened his hypertension.
“My present condition is pitiful, the pressure from the family and the pain of living an isolated life because you can’t eat normal food like anyone and being poor even the drugs I can’t afford talkless of special food”.
“Sometimes I will spend 2 or 3 days without taking any drug because I can’t afford to buy it. My income is small and the government has not provided free diabetes drugs for us. I am just living waiting for my death time”, he said.
Dr Sule Bathnna, who is a consultant endocrinologist at the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Teaching Hospital Bauchi, says statistic has shown that 75 percent of global deaths from diabetes occur in low and middle-income countries like Nigeria with poor health care, and the majority of these deaths occur below the ages of 60 years.
He said people living with diabetes are at high risk of severe illnesses and death from other diseases, advised people to eat healthy foods, get more physically active, limit their intake of takeaway and processed food and avoid smoking and alcohol, in order to prevent themselves from the disease.
