John Prescott yesterday launched a government campaign to tackle diabetes to stop an estimated 1,000 patients a year going blind or suffering sight defects.

The deputy prime minister, whose diabetes became public last year, was at St Thomas's hospital in central London to announce plans to ensure that eye screening services for the estimated 1.3 million people in England known to have diabetes will be in place by 2007.

"With me, it's almost like a coming out statement, where I am declared to be a diabetic," he said yesterday. "I discovered this about two years ago during the general election. I had the symptoms that should be recognised by those 1 million people who might be suffering from diabetes.

"I had a dry mouth, problems with an awful lot of water-passing, lots of weight loss, and a certain personality change identified by some of my colleagues."

Fellow sufferers had to "come out of the shadows. If you leave it, it will go on and your life will deteriorate." Other regular health checks for patients and others considered at risk of the disease, including those who are obese or undergoing heart problems, would be introduced a year earlier under a 10-year plan to improve services for diabetes.

The national service framework to tackle diabetes will for the first time require registers of those with the disease, which, though eminently treatable, still has no cure.

A million more people, particularly those with type two diabetes that does not normally need self-injection with insulin, are thought to remain undiagnosed.

Ethnic minorities and poor people have a far higher risk of diabetes, and the government sees getting its strategy right as central to its promise to reduce health inequalities.

The plans were welcomed by groups representing patients and specialists in the field, although Diabetes UK is concerned that funding has not been ringfenced.