Panorama

Diabetes The Hidden Killer

Britain is in the grip of a health epidemic that's threatening to overwhelm the NHS. More and more of us are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It's a hidden killer which can lead to heart failure, blindness, kidney disease and leg amputations. Now even children are being diagnosed with the condition. Filming over six months, Panorama reports from the frontline of the epidemic - in Birmingham, where almost one in ten people has the disease. In this film, type 1 diabetes was referred to as 'the sort you're born with'. We acknowledge this is not medically accurate. Type 1 often develops in childhood to genetically predisposed individuals, but it can develop at any age, resulting from immune mediated injury to the pancreas.