Why can’t we donate insulin?
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Medicine is very regulated. If it is a controlled substance, then only the person who has the prescription is allowed to possess it. Plus it’s possible that people could put other things in medication that they donate. Or it could be expired or not stored properly. When someone’s health is at risk you shouldn’t have to worry about the substance you are taking.
Insulin is manufactured the same way citric acid and MSG are- a big tank full of genetically modified bacteria that fart it out as a metabolic by-product. It’s extremely cheap to make, so there’s no reason to bother trying to extract it from living organisms anymore.
its not worth extracting it off live donors when you can synthetize it and not only will it be chemically identical it can be made at a much wider scale at essentially cost.
the question should be more: “why isnt insulin freely accesible?”, considering the person that created the method ot synthetize insulin explicity made its patent “free” to ensure everyone has access to it.
These biohackers plan to give away their instructions for how to make insulin for free.
Today, over seven million Americans with diabetes use at least one form of insulin to treat the disease, but many are at risk of not getting the care they need. The American Diabetes Association reported that 25% of patients have turned to self-rationing their medication to deal with its ever-increasing price tag.
It’s estimated that a vial of insulin costs pharmaceutical companies five to six dollars to manufacture, but because of a complicated web of regulations those companies are able to sell vials for $180-400. And rising costs are nothing new. Insulin prices tripled from 2002 to 2013, and doubled between 2012 and 2016.
A group of dedicated biohackers believes that making insulin more accessible requires taking the monopoly away from the big three pharmaceutical companies that produce it. So they’ve started the Open Insulin Foundation, a non-profit with plans to develop the world’s first open-source insulin production model.
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https://www.youtube.com/freethinkmedia?sub_confirmation=1&video=insulin
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