In commending George Debono for his piece on “the two national scourges” last Saturday and, especially, appreciating his promotion of healthier diets and lifestyle, may I point out that the local prevalence rate for type II diabetes is nowhere near the figure he quotes.

In October 2014, I had written to this newspaper pointing out that the prevalence of diabetes in Malta has been found to be 7.7 per cent in a population of over-15s by Antoine Schranz’s epidemiological study published in Diabetes research and clinical practice in 1989. That would be about 6.2 per cent standardised to the whole Maltese population.

The incidence and prevalence of diabetes in Malta have also been published as part of my contribution to the electronic health indicator data report for the European Commission. This is still available in full at ec.europa.eu.

Again, in that report the prevalence of diabetes mellitus in Malta is reported at 6.25 per cent, standardised to a European Union standard population (EU15).

For my PhD studies, I repeated this analysis based on an international standard research database extracted from the electronic patient records of about 10,000 patients (yearly average) registered with Maltese family doctors. The most recent estimate for the population prevalence of diabetes mellitus (type I and type II together, over a period of observation of five years from 2001 to 2005) was then 5.9 per cent (standardised to the Maltese population in 2002), with an annual incidence of 0.5 per cent (non-standardised).

These figures are consistent, are very close to those published by Schranz in 1989 and I have been published in the international medical journal Family practice in 2012.

The best estimates for the prevalence of diabetes in Malta consistently indicate a figure of between six per cent and 6.25 per cent. They are now 10 years old and may need updating.