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MMC for Health and Social Development Mpho Phalatse, along with the City of Joburg (COJ), have launched a campaign against diabetes, an illness that kills one person every seven seconds in the world.
According to the COJ, diabetes has been the leading cause of death in South Africa in the past three years, and 6th leading cause of death in Joburg.
“Today we’re at a stakeholder forum as the COJ with our partners and we’re talking urban diabetes as the city’s changing diabetes initiative of which the COJ is a part of. COJ is only one of eight cities in the world – the only in South Africa – that is part of the changing diabetes initiative, looking at how we can tackle urban diabetes.
“This is in recognition of the fact that diabetes is a serious problem, particularly with lifestyles in urban areas. We see that about 60% of the world’s GDP comes from about 600 cities only. So this is also an economic issue. We need to really look at how we can reserve our human capital through healthy lifestyle and health interventions that actually work,” said Phalatse.
The COJ has suggested a few ideas to help people make healthier choices to avoid diabetes.
Apparently sex and kissing burn more calories than exercising, according to the COJ on Twitter.
“We encourage residents to kiss more, it helps address diabetes, burns 6.4 calories a minute,” it further said.
These two suggestions were warmly welcomed by South Africans, who said they would try their best to burn the calories.
We guess the COJ then got caught up in the moment, and made another suggestion that unfortunately left the Twitterverse fuming, accusing the DA of “nationalising our kota without compensation”.
The COJ suggested people switch their normal kota for this:
This kota has been called “nonsense”, “sandwich”, and “private school kota”, to name a few – while others have simply refused to recognise it as a kota.
Their version has cucumber, peppers, tomato and boiled eggs, all of that with brown bread, but Twitter says: “Never!!! It can’t be called a kota if it does not have fried chips, fried russian, atchar, polony and fried egg. Diabetes a e yeme ga nnyane.”
These were some of the reactions on Twitter: