Diabetes screening at Charles E Mills Secondary

(ZIZ News) — On Thursday students at the Charles E. Mills Secondary School participated in a diabetes screening exercise hosted by the St. Kitts Diabetes Association.

According to the association’s public relations officer Dr. Reginald O’Loughlin, the screening will hopefully assist in detecting new cases among the children and provide important information about issues related to diabetes at the school.

He said, “We think the exercise went pretty successfully today. We think we had good collaboration with the staff here at the school. We had good collaboration with the ministry of health and so we at the St. Kitts Diabetes Association are quite pleased with the activity. We had a quite brisk turn out from the kids here. We did get in excess of 100 children. We took the data which we think will be relevant for us to work out those at risk and those already found to be diabetic, what their present status would be.”

Dr. O’Loughlin said the association not only intends to make the data available to the public, it also intends to have screenings in other schools as well.

“We recognize that diabetes is a serious and so we need to do everything and anything possible to hopefully temper the course and make life a little easier for those who are already known to be diabetic and at the same time pick up, detect and uncover those who are not yet known to be diabetic so that we can have an idea of what is happening in the schools and we hope to use this exercise as a launching pad from which we will replicate the activity in other high schools,” he said.

The St. Kitts Diabetes Association hosted the diabetes screening in recognition of World Health Day which was observed under the theme “Beat Diabetes”.