CAPE TOWN (Reuters) — As simple a treatment as aspirin is one way to cut the more than $232 billion spent on diabetes each year and help prevent related deaths due to heart attacks and strokes, a health economist said yesterday.Jonathan Betz Brown, chair of the task force on diabetes health economics at the International Diabetes Federation, said rocketing costs of preventing and treating diabetes would likely rise to more than $300 billion per year by 2025. Much of the costs are borne by developing countries where diabetes rates are rising but resources to fight it are lowest. “Costs are exploding, but we’re not spending enough in places where most (diabetic) people live,” Brown told a news conference at the World Diabetes Congress in Cape Town. “We all pay for diabetes — it comes out of economic growth.”

Annual diabetes deaths are now at about 3.8 million, equivalent to the global toll of HIV/AIDS and malaria combined. About 80 percent of the estimated 380 million people projected to contract diabetes in the next 20 years will be in poor and middle income countries where medical systems are weak. The US, home to just eight percent of the world’s total population of people with diabetes, accounts for more than 50 percent of global diabetes expenditure or more than $6,000 per patient.