If we don’t control type 2 diabetes it will devastate Africa worst than HIV
By Mulugeta Gebregziabher, PhD
Tigrai Online, Sept. 26, 2014
Dr. Mulugeta Gebregziabher is Associate Professor at the Department of Public Health, Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). He has been involved in collaborative research and in creating partnerships with Ethiopian universities over the past few years. He talked to Mihret Moges of the Ethiopian Reporter about his recent very productive trip to Ethiopia that encompassed three themes:
Dr. Kindeya Gebrehiwot President of Mekelle Univesity and Dr. Mulugeta Gebregziabher
- 1. Exploring interest and conditions for including Ethiopia into the Eastern Africa type-2 diabetes research and prevention initiative that has been led by Prof Leonard Egede (who visited Ethiopia with him for a week). This has gotten a buy in from stakeholders such as the Bureau of health of Tigray and the three universities in Tigray. The next step after doing a pilot assessment in Tigray is to scale it up to a national level. He underscores in the interview he gave to the Ethiopian Reporter that the prevalence of diabetes in Ethiopia is rising and unless we do something about preventive interventions at this stage it would be very costly after it becomes epidemic. We do not want to repeat the mistakes made on HIV/AIDS.
- Signing of a memorandum of understanding between MUSC and Mekelle University to partner and cooperate on HIV/AIDS research. This will focus on research capacity building that can be easily extrapolated to other disease areas (communicable as well as non-communicable). This was done during his visit to Mekelle University and it is an ongoing funded project that is led by him as Principal Investigator with co-investigators from Ethiopia and the US.
- ED-REAP Excellence Award: he presented the ED-REAP Excellence Award in Adigrat University during the colorful inaugural graduation ceremony in July 2014. The same award program was also implemented in Aksum and Mekelle Universities. The award is given to a male and female with the best cumulative GPA from among the graduating class of each university. The awardees from each university got a certificate and ETB3000.00. The first phase of the award was done with limited resources based on pocket contributions from the founding members of ED-REAP (www.ED-REAP.org) and the goal is to scale it up to a national level in 2015.
Please read Dr. Mulugeta's interview on Reporter by clicking here
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