Animal insulin - please help!

When you think about it, Animal insulin was the first insulin available in 1921, where has the human based insulin’s have only around something like 20 years… So one would assume that animal insulin is well tried and tested in over 80 years of use treating diabetes…

There are a few diabetics that can not tolerate the human version of insulin, so use animal insulin, and there are properly a lot more diabetics who have difficulties controlling there diabetes that might well benefit from transferring to animal insulin’s to see if this improves there control.

The only real disadvantage with animal insulin, is that you have to inject it around 30 minutes before you eat as it takes time to start to work in the system, which can be a disadvantage when you are not sure how many carbs that you either want to or going to have for your meal..

So if you look at it based on a proven track record, the I would say that animal insulin is well proven to be safe, I think that 80 years down the line any major problems with it would have been identified a long time ago… If you friend is happy and doing well there is no need to be worried or concerned about how safe the animal insulin is, you can assume that it is safe to use and well proven..

Bambi12 said:

Please can anyone help me with something I am very worried about?

I have a close friend who is a type one diabetic and uses animal insulin for her treatment - lately I have begun to worry over the safety of this insulin. Is animal insulin perfectly safe to use in that it has been thoroughly tested beforehand? Is there any possibility of diseases being passed from animals to the diabetic through the insulin? I suffer from health anxiety and once I get something like this in my head I find it very hard to stop worrying about it.

If anyone could please help me I would be very grateful, thankyou.

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Animal insulin is safe. You cannot contract any diseases from using it - it is refined before use (it's not taken straight from the animal and given to humans).

Hi, I appreciate that this was a serious enquiry, but I had a little chuckle when I read it. What on earth made you so concerned about animal insulin???
I would have more concerns about the new GM synthetically produced medications calling themselves insulin, that have not been tested over a long enough period of time to be proven safe! Are women still told to stop taking novorapid (as I was)and Lantus when thinking about getting pregnant?
I changed to animal insulin last May after many years on synthetic "insulins" and suffering lousy blood sugar control and horrible side-effects.
Many people have lived for years on animal insulin-it is highly purified, natural and safe.
I doubt we'll be saying the same about "human" or "analogue" insulins in 80 years.
By the way Human insulin does is not extracted from dead humans!
Jopar, while I appreciate that it may be inconvenient for people to have to wait longer to eat after taking short-acting animal insulin-I find this is far outweighed by the gentler effect of the insulin resulting in less hypos and better control. If I get particularly impatient I'll do a Fergus and low carb!
Jus