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 the condition was responsible for some four million deaths worldwide every year.
By 2025 it was likely to affect about six percent of the world's population.
He said diabetes was not as well publicised as HIV and Aids, "but it will be the pandemic of this century".
'As ready as it can be' He said the congress was one of the channels the federation, which is based in Brussels, used to communicate its message, which included a campaign for a United Nations resolution on diabetes calling on individual countries to adopt national diabetes programmes.
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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 would be arriving on normal scheduled aircraft flights, and 85 shuttle vehicles were on standby to take them from Cape Town International Airport to their accommodation.
Part of Coen Steytler Boulevard, which runs past the convention centre, would be closed off to normal traffic and turned into a giant bus stop for delegates' transport.
'This is a model case' Members of the city's metered taxi association had agreed to carry federation logos on their vehicles and to charge a standard R10 a kilometre.
Elzinga said this would not be the first time that there were 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 were different.
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