Image: Mr. Henrik Bendix Dahl
Novo Nordisk Pharma (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd and the Ministry of Health announced their collaboration to launch Jom Mama, a pre-pregnancy intervention research project targeting young couples, making official their partnership to address diabetes prevention.
“We are proud that Malaysia has been chosen as the first pilot country. This project is very timely and fits well with our national non-communicable disease (NCD) priorities on prevention. We hope that by focusing our efforts towards a target group who is highly motivated to have a healthy child, we will be successful in communicating the importance of healthy pregnancy across to them,” notes Dato’ Seri Dr Hilmi bin Haji Yahya, Deputy Minister of Health, Malaysia.
For the next four years, this project aims to gather evidence that a pre-pregnancy health intervention targeting young married couples can reduce the risk of diabetes, a disease that has increased 31.0% in the span of just 5 years in Malaysia.
“This is a long run project and we’ve aimed to decrease the risk of diabetes. If you think the research is expensive, try diabetes,” said Professor Mark Hanson, The University of Southampton, United Kingdom.
HRH Crown Princess Mary of Denmark
The agreement was signed by Datuk Farida Mohd Ali, Secretary-General of the Ministry of Health, Malaysia and Mr. Henrik Bendix Dahl, General Manager of Novo Nordisk in Malaysia. Witnessing the partnership was Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mary of Denmark together with Yang Berhormat Dato’ Seri Dr Hilmi bin Haji Yahya, the Deputy Minister of Health, Malaysia and Novo Nordisk’s Regional Vice President, Mr. Maziar Mike Doustdar.
Signing Ceremony
The Jom Mama project will be enrolling couples in the programme in early 2014, which will be run as a three-year study to evaluate both qualitative and quantitative outcomes.
“We hope that once we’re stable to go, we would love to run the same project with other countries for a better healthy life and avoid diabetes to our future generation,” said Ms. Charlotte ErsbrØll, Corporate Vice President of Global Stakeholder Engagement, Novo Nordisk.
