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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-05-18 Daily Xml
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JUVENILE DIABETES RESEARCH FOUNDATION

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY (15:34): Once again, I rise to bring to members' attention a cause that is of special interest and concern to me, and that is the vanquishing for all time of type 1 diabetes in children. As members will be aware, I have been associated with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation for a considerable period now as a supporter, advocate and fundraiser. My extended relationship with the foundation means that I have been able to keep a watching brief on some exciting research developments that I would like to outline today.

First, let me consider the impact of type 1 diabetes on children, their parents, their siblings, their schoolmates, teachers, friends and others with whom they interact during their daily lives—lives that are punctuated with a relentless and unremitting obligation to test and retest blood sugar levels, to calibrate insulin dosages and inject or use an insulin pen or manage an insulin pump; how to deal with their dietary intake; the effects of exercise; social events such as sleepovers with friends, school camps and a host of other activities of daily life; and when testing might be required during sleeping hours as well as waking ones.

As I have pointed out previously in this place on this topic, the effects of the disease on quality of life are not absolute: they are cumulative. Indeed, I take this opportunity to repeat just a couple of remarks from a former address to this chamber. Over time, blood vessels and the tissues and organs they supply sustain permanent damage from chronically high levels of blood glucose. Because it necessarily affects almost every organ in the body, diabetes can result in major complications include diabetic kidney, eye and nerve diseases, among others, and cardiovascular disease.

Because type 1 diabetes impacts on children and young people at the beginning of their lives rather than in later years, many face such serious complications while they are still only young adults, and I would like everyone in this chamber to consider that carefully. Type 1 diabetes could affect any of our children. About 80 per cent of people diagnosed with type 1 diabetes have no family history. The incidence of type 1 diabetes in Australian children is on the way up, and there are more diagnosed every year.

A cure is the sole way by which people with type 1 diabetes can achieve not only quality of life but also the lifespan that their non-diabetic contemporaries expect. Of course, there can be no cure without research. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation is the world's leading non-profit NGO with regard to funding for diabetes research. In fact, the foundation has been involved with nearly every development in research for some 40 years.

In the 2008-09 financial year, the JDRF invested in excess of $14 million into 63 research projects around the nation. Its research focuses on related areas of cure therapies (beta cell and immune therapies) and treatment therapies (glucose control and complication therapies). Today I can tell you about two very encouraging recent developments. According to the foundation's website, the beta cells of diabetic mice have been successfully encouraged to reproduce themselves. This is real progress. As the head of research development for JDRF in Australia, Dr Dorota Pawlak commented:

Beta cells are the victims of the auto immune attack that causes type 1 diabetes. In combination with stopping that attack, regrowth or transplant of beta cells using techniques like this will be the key to restoring health and curing this disease.

At the Garvan Institute in Sydney researchers have found a drug that might negate the need for immuno-suppression following islet transplantation. By fighting the body's own killer immune cells the drug acts to prevent the destruction of transplanted islet cells. If successful, this would revolutionise diabetes research, because patients would only have to take the drug for a short period after islet transplant surgery. After that period the transplant would be fine for life. These are fantastic developments but, as always, more time and funds are needed before we can say that juvenile diabetes, or any diabetes, is a thing of the past.

Once again, I invite members to dig deep and participate in JDRF's jelly baby month this month. Jelly babies can save lives, the lives of diabetics. This month jelly baby merchandise will be available in supermarkets, pharmacies, schools and workplaces right across Australia. JDRF's goal for 2010 is to raise over $1 million to fund and support vital research into this terrible condition. I have said this before when speaking on this topic, and I will say it again for as long as I am in this place: when it comes to the welfare of our children, we are all on the same side.

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