Pres­i­dent of the In­ter­na­tion­al Di­a­betes Fed­er­a­tion (IDF) Pro­fes­sor Jean Claude Mbanya will de­liv­er the fea­ture ad­dress at the T&T Di­a­betes As­so­ci­a­tion's an­nu­al sym­po­sium to­mor­row. The event takes place at the new Ch­agua­nas Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion's Ad­min­is­tra­tive Com­plex, Cum­ber­batch Street, Ch­agua­nas. Di­a­betes af­fects thou­sands of peo­ple in T&T and a stag­ger­ing 285 mil­lion peo­ple world­wide, ac­cord­ing to the IDF which is based in Brus­sels. To­mor­row's sym­po­sium will look at pre­ven­tion. In keep­ing with this theme, Mbanya's ad­dress will fo­cus on "Stop Di­a­betes Through Ed­u­ca­tion and Pre­ven­tion".

Mbanya is a pro­fes­sor of Med­i­cine and En­docrinol­o­gy at the Fac­ul­ty of Med­i­cine and Bio­med­ical Sci­ences, Uni­ver­si­ty of Yaounde, Cameroon. He is al­so con­sul­tant physi­cian and di­rec­tor of the Na­tion­al Obe­si­ty Cen­tre at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Yaounde and chief of En­docrinol­o­gy and Meta­bol­ic Dis­ease Unit at the Yaounds hos­pi­tal. Al­so sched­uled to make pre­sen­ta­tions at the sym­po­sium are lo­cal spe­cial­ists and re­searchers in di­a­betes, Dr Visha­la Par­masad, Dr Lall Sawh, Dr Car­o­line Alex­is-Thomas and al­so Dr Ri­ta Kalyani, from Johns Hop­kins in Bal­ti­more, MD, USA.

Dur­ing his stay, which ends on Mon­day, Mbanya al­so will be mak­ing cour­tesy calls on Pres­i­dent Maxwell Richards and First La­dy Dr Jean Ramjohn-Richards, the pa­tron of the Di­a­betes As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go. He is ex­pect­ed to meet with Min­is­ter of Health, Therese Bap­tiste-Cor­nelis, and Min­is­ter of For­eign Af­fairs Dr Su­ru­jrat­tan Ram­bachan.

• For more in­for­ma­tion con­tact at 672-0864.