This is an extract from a Bloomberg article today.The most...

This is an extract from a Bloomberg article today.

The most comprehensive nationwide survey for diabetes ever conducted in China shows 11.6 percent of adults, or 114 million, has the disease. The finding, published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, adds 22 million diabetics, or the population of Australia, to a 2007 estimate and means almost one in three diabetes sufferers globally is in China.

Chinese are developing the metabolic disease at a lower body mass index than Americans, the researchers found, meaning that changes in diet and physical activity stoked by rapid economic development are resulting in an earlier onset of the obesity-linked disease. The epidemic will worsen with 40 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds on the verge of developing diabetes, which increases the risk of stroke, heart attack and kidney failure.

“Diabetes in China has become a catastrophe,” said Paul Zimmet, honorary president of the International Diabetes Federation and director emeritus of the BakerIDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne. “The booming economy in China has brought with it a medical problem which could bankrupt the health system. The big question is the capacity in China to deal with a health problem of such magnitude.”

Eclipsing U.S.