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Insulin In The Uk

Robinredbreast said:
i am now on Twitter and reading his 'tweets'.
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I normally avoid twitter and facebook like the plague but they have their uses from time to time!

I have an occasional look at ECED's feed, Edinburgh Centre for Endocrinology and Diabetes, as I'm treated by one of the hospitals it covers.

https://mobile.twitter.com/edinburgh_endo?lang=en

Their most recent tweet was really interesting. Andrew Kirkby posts from time to time on a Scottish T1 facebook page, so I recognised his name in Dr Dover's tweet on 24 July. She'd been talking to him about his home made artificial pancreas and says that plans are afoot to have him talk to other T1s about the kit.

It's fascinating that home made solutions like openAPS and xDrip+ built by techno-geeks, which, to a large extent, are still underground, are now being actively looked at by forward thinking doctors.
 
Robinredbreast said:
i am now on Twitter and reading his 'tweets'.
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Seems to be a good guy does Dr Kar, he was one of the movers in regard to the Libre, I've followed him for a long time and never said quack
 
Interesting that the pharmaceutical companies did not want Brexit for the reasons stated above, but as with any business they have to prepare for the worse.

Thing is, the possible reason that insulin has been brought to the front is because TM uses it. Now if she had a child with cancer then I suspect the same story would be rolled out just replace 'insulin' with a 'cancer' drug.

Now, the same thing applies to medicines made in the country and some can only be made in this country and those in Europe are also fearing the same thing.

The pharm companies at the moment are busy at full production tying to make enough/stock pile of everything if there is break down or a no deal.

Should we be worried?

Not at the moment as pointed out we had insulin imports before we join the EU and it has a fairly long shelf life.

However it is up to you.
 
I think it’s not so much whether insulin will continue to be imported, because of course it will. It’s the complete lack of any infrastructure at our ports to cope with all the hours and hours of red tape and paperwork that’ll have to be sorted before a load of anything is permitted to enter the country. There isn’t enough parking for trucks, for starters. And when up until now most supplies are arriving on a “just in time” basis, because we have frictionless borders, unless this is sorted out PDQ, there could well be a significant disruption to supplies of many medications. There isn’t the warehousing to stockpile much of anything, and shops don’t have the storage space either. That’s where the problems are going to happen.
 
Knikki said:
but as with any business they have to prepare for the worse.
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The most intelligent comment I've heard so far on this Brexit mess was from a financial journalist on Question Time.

She said that in a few decades time, historians will be writing about how brexit involved some changes in trade arrangements which companies learned to deal with and then things carried on.

This whole thing will be a lot easier as soon as politicians shut their mouths, get some sort of agreement in place, and leave the real wealth creators and producers to get on with what they do.

Whatever the agreement turns out to be, producers and suppliers will figure out ways of working with it.

I'm maintaining my sanity by reading the Daily Mash on a regular basis:

https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news...ith-exit-barred-from-leaving-eu-2015061199125

https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/poli...you-really-like-fish-says-gove-20180705175018
 
Mel dCP said:
I wouldn’t use that poisonous rag to line my cat litter tray, but about five people sent me a link to the article when it was published
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I love to picture the reproachful look on your cat's face when it realises it's tray has been lined with a politically incorrect / despicable publication
 
Do you think when these agreements first started they had all these fancy computers? All hand written.
Maybe they should employ more staff?

Many exiters wanted more staff in UK than out. They were tired of contracts going abroad. One contract that cannot be done abroad, eh?
 
A quick breakfast Google search shows that Eli Lilly make their insulin in the USA & Puerto Rico and have a 'filling line' in China, Novo Nordisk have a 'research centre' as part of Oxford university and make insulin in Denmark, the USA and China and last but not least Sanofi manufacture (it seems) in Germany, Russia and have a filling plant in China and plan to open in India, so that must leave options regardless of the politics.
 
I wrote about this on Saturday:

http://www.diabettech.com/brexit/fa...n-to-insulin-and-brexit-should-we-be-worried/

Basically, all the Human insulin we use in the UK is manufactured in France, Spain and Denmark. The UK produces Porcine and Bovine insulin.

Opening up agreements with non-UK suppliers comes with two issues:
  1. We can't make trade agreements outside the EU till we're outside the EU
  2. Logistics for importing from China or the US are vastly different in terms of transporting insulin, than from EU countries, in terms of cost of refrigerated shipping.
Of all the prescriptions for Insulin in England in April 2018, 0.3% were for Bovine and Porcine, and 99.7% were for Human and Human Analogue.

In other words, while we do produce insulin in the UK, it's not what the vast majority of insulin users use, so to all intents and purposes, looking at what Rawlins said, we might as well not produce a drop of insulin in the UK!
 
http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2018/07/27/this-is-what-no-deal-brexit-actually-looks-like

WTO terms are less advantageous than the deals we have now; otherwise there would not have been any point in making those deals in the first place. HTH
 
dbr10 said:
http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2018/07/27/this-is-what-no-deal-brexit-actually-looks-like

WTO terms are less advantageous than the deals we have now; otherwise there would not have been any point in making those deals in the first place. HTH
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We have a massive trade deficit with the EU. We have a trade surplus with the rest of the world, some of those trade surpluses are with countries where we trade on WTO terms.

Here is a nice bit of data, from the ONS, giving 2016 data on UK exports/imports for various countries. As you will see we have a trade surplus with Australia, Canada, and Japan, but there was no EU FTA with those countries in 2016.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindu...ade/articles/whodoestheuktradewith/2017-02-21

You can look here to find all the countries the EU has an FTA with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_free_trade_agreements#Free_trade_agreements_in_force

There is a whole lot more to trade than just FTA's you have to export things that people in other countries want to buy The best frictionless trade agreement in the world isn't going to sell British made Belgian type chocolates to Belgium. One of the problems with the EU is that because the economies of it's members are very similar, it's markets can become saturated. The Euro is also an issue here, as it allows Germany to engage in currency manipulation. But you know that of course, don't you.
 
Hi Kev, just off the phone to Eli Lilly :- I have just been in touch with Eli Lilly, and talked to Lorna about why they import from so many countries, including 3 rd world countries. As I pointed out that they are such a huge well known pharmaceutical company, why can't they manufacture and process Insulin, here in the UK. Lorna said it is a company decision. I talked about the ongoing Brexit worries that have been posted on a Diabetes forum and Lorna said patients would be reassured that there would be no affect on us getting Insulin, but obviously she couldn't speak for my Insulin manufacture's, Novo Nordisk, or other's. So I asked for feedback regarding my call and she took my name, telephone No and email address.
Here is their link :- https://www.lilly.co.uk/en/products/index.aspx
 
Hi @Robinredbreast it's likely they don't make it here as there'll not be the demand in Britain for the investment needed for the necessary plant and the channel 'probably' makes export dearer, Novo Nordisk have the worlds largest plant in Denmark and others in other continents you'd imagine for economic reasons.

Honestly I'd not worry at all and your best source of updates is Doctor Kar.
 

Not overly worried or anxious, it's good that it is getting talked about on the forum, but I thought I would get it straight from the horse's mouth and I hope to hear from Eli Lilly in due course.
 
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Just caught up with this thread, thanks for the biggest laugh I've had for days
 

Absolutely..and the EU has just done a deal with Japan and the US because they know what they want.
 
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