MINISTER OF HEALTH Terrence Deyalsingh advised women who were part of a pap-smear drive over the weekend to be aware of their health if they wanted to avoid ending up in a hospital bed.

He said not enough people are aware of their health conditions as they do not check on important details, such as cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure.

“How many of you know someone with diabetes and they may have had a limb amputated?” Deyalsingh asked the group of women during a presentation at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Center on Sunday.

“How many of you know someone who is hypertensive and had a stroke? How many people in this room know your blood-pressure reading, blood-sugar reading or cholesterol levels? That is the problem we are facing.”

He said if people were aware of those three parameters and are able to keep them at normal levels, they would significantly decrease their chances of suffering from strokes, cardiovascular disease, low or high blood pressure.

Normal blood pressure would be less than 120/80 milligrams per deciliter (mg/d); normal fasting blood sugar would be about 99 mg/dL and cholesterol should be less than 200 mg/dL.

“I am asking the women, because you are heads of the households, to get in tune with yourself and your numbers but also spread the word to your family,” he said.

He also asked the women to encourage their children to engage in more physical activity, instead of staying inside.

“Our children are not playing as much as they used to, they are tied to these devices. So you have to get your children to de-link, to put the devices down and run outside and kick a ball.”

He also asked women to avoid fast food, describing fridges full of leftovers as “death traps.”

“I am not saying don’t eat the occasional doubles or chicken and chips, but that should not be your meal plan. What we are asking people is to take control of what we eat and what our children eat and if we do that we won’t have to demand a hospital bed.”

The two-day pap-smear drive saw 500 women being tested on Saturday and about 350 women being tested on Sunday.

A pap-smear test is a procedure to test for cervical cancer in women involving collecting cells from a woman’s cervix. Doctors generally recommend repeating pap-smear tests every three years for women ages 21 to 65.

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