Agent ampoules of the newly launched diabetes drug Lyxumia are put into an injection-pen at a manufacturing site of French drugmaker Sanofi in Frankfurt June 5, 2013.

Agent ampoules of the newly launched diabetes drug Lyxumia are put into an injection-pen at a manufacturing site of French drugmaker Sanofi in Frankfurt June 5, 2013. Reuters/Ralph Orlowski

When the World Health Organisation (WHO) released a report on Thursday that global diabetes cases quadrupled over 34 years, there was no question on the numbers. However, the launch in March by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of a pre-diabetes Web site is being criticised as unnecessary.

Hank Campbell, president of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), in an article on American Thinker, points out that the condition pre-diabetes, is non-existent. He says the CDC, would be making millions of Americans who take the survey in the portal believe they do have the ailment and make 86 million Americans sick.

The launch comes at a time that health care costs and drug prices are major political issues as Americans head for the voting precincts in November. It could be seen as big pharmaceutical companies’ way of boosting sales further even if the majority of diabetics, those with Type 2 diabetes, could reverse their condition by dieting and losing fat with no medication needed.

Campbell stresses that for an ailment to have true medical designation, it needs clinical relevance. However, he notes that even the American Diabetes Association have recently began to claim that having a hemoglobin A1c – the average blood sugar level over the last three months – of 5.7 percent is a precursor of diabetes or pre-diabetes.

“A hemoglobin of 5.7 to 6.4 percent does not predict diabetes the way actual impaired glucose tolerance does,” Campbell writes. He says that diabetes is life-threatening without medication, but metformin, the most prescribed diabetes drug, has little benefit versus risk at lower hemoglobin A1C levels.

The ACSH president adds that if national governments adopt CDC’s classification of pre-diabetes, 50 percent of Chinese would have the new ailment, while the National Health Service in UK would have the number of diabetes-related patients jump 500 percent. Campbell stresses that in other countries, people with lower hemoglobin A1C levels do not show a significant progression to diabetes at all.

Even the WHO prefers that the term not be used, Campbell continues, because many people with that classification do not progress to diabetes. However, California medical experts had already declared that 46 percent of California adults are pre-diabetics, according to a UCLA study, reports the LA Times.

The UCLA experts used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to create a model that predicts pre-diabetes and applied it to data from the California Health Interview Survey which reckoned 13 million adult Californians are pre-diabetes or undiagnosed diabetes.

Campbell says that existence of pre-diabetes is not different from other had health beliefs, such as red wine, acai berries and chocolates, where a “ghost army” is created based on poorly done studies to appear as “weight of evidence.”