About 12 000 people will flood into Cape Town this weekend for the biggest international conference the city has ever hosted — the three-yearly World Diabetes Congress.
The executive director of the International Diabetes Foundation, Luc Hendrickx, told reporters in Cape Town on Monday that diabetes is responsible for about four million deaths worldwide every year.
By 2025 it is likely to affect about 6% of the world’s population.
He said diabetes is not as ”sexy” as HIV/Aids ”but it will be the pandemic of this century”.
He said the congress is one of the channels the foundation, which is based in Brussels, uses to communicate its message, which includes a campaign for a United Nations resolution on diabetes calling on individual countries to adopt national diabetes programmes.
Dirk Elzinga, managing director of the Cape Town International Convention Centre, where most of the congress will take place, said planning for the event had begun five years ago while the centre was still under construction.
”Cape Town is as ready as it can be for this conference,” he said.
Delegates will be arriving on normal scheduled aircraft flights, and 85 shuttle vehicles are on standby to take them from Cape Town International airport to their accommodation.
Part of Coen Steytler Boulevard, which runs past the convention centre, will be closed off to normal traffic and turned into a giant bus stop for delegates’ transport.
Members of the city’s metered taxi association have agreed to carry federation logos on their vehicles and to charge a standard R10 a kilometre.
Elzinga said this will not be the first time that there are so many people in the convention centre — there had been 15 000 for the Cape Town International Jazz Festival — but the demands of a congress are different.
There will be up to nine sessions running concurrently at the convention centre, with additional meetings at the neighbouring Arabella Sheraton and Cullinan hotels.
He said the congress is the first of five medical conferences that will each draw over 10 000 delegates to the convention centre and the city over the next eight years.
”I really believe that ‘Team Cape Town’ is going to make it happen,” he said.
Brian McDonald, managing director of Global Conferences, the company organising delegates’ accommodation, said 109 hotels and guest houses have been contracted and 7 952 rooms sold.
This adds up to over 29 000 room nights for the duration of the conference.
There are still rooms available in the city, though Global Conferences is having difficulty booking for the odd last-minute group of 30 or 40 that has suddenly decided it wants a block of rooms.
”We will find everybody a room, I’m absolutely sure of that,” he said.
”This is a model case that shows we can bring these big numbers to Cape Town.”
The congress opens on Sunday December 3 and ends on December 7.
The next World Diabetes Congress will be in Montreal, Canada, in 2009. — Sapa