S.S.B. Donated 30K to Kidney Association of Belize

This morning, the Social Security Board handed over a cheque for thirty-thousand dollars to the Kidney Association of Belize. The monies have been earmarked to boost the association’s education awareness campaign in the prevention of chronic kidney disease. Vice President, Genevieve Baptist, told News Five that the monies will also be used for screening and testing since there has been an alarming increase of persons diagnosed with diabetes and hypertension.

Genevieve Baptist, Vice President, Kidney Association of Belize

“Beside the school campaign we are also doing in office. And we are doing presentations, screening and testing. The screening, we use urinalysis strips and we also use diabetes strips to do the testing.”

Hipolito Novelo

“What is the importance of sharing this information and providing these services?”

Genevieve Baptist

Genevieve Baptist

“It is very important because we are finding out that when we do the health fairs, the number of people showing up at the health fair is depleting and the disease is rising at a higher rate. So, we have decided to go and meet the patients and the populace instead of the populace coming to us. So, we are doing the in school campaign where we are educating the students because we are finding students age that are having the disease. We are also screening and testing the teachers at the school. At the same time, we are also doing the companies. We are looking for diabetes, hypertension and also looking for protein in the urine. During this screening and testing, we are finding out that a lot of people are unaware that they have diabetes and hypertension. When we do testing we find out that the readings are very high and some of them will tell you that they are not diabetic or hypertensive. But we continually do the tests over and we find the readings consistently high.”

S.S.B. donated the funds through its Ride Across Belize fundraising initiative.