| From what I've seen on the internet, Joe wasn't kidding about the mood swings.
And although I now have my own reservations about Lantus after comparing other people's experiences with my own, I'm sure as **** not going to jump onto this ill-informed bandwagon of bashing synthetic insulin.
The tragic thing is that the 95% of people who have had problems with synthetic or human insulin have previously been treated with animal insulin. And to me it's fairly obvious why. Their bodies are simply just used to dealing with the animal stuff, and because synth insulin has a different action to animal, it's a case of having to completely relearn how to control their diabetes, which explains away instantly the problem with swinging bg etc.
Sythn insulin IS human insulin. The way it's produced is by taking the DNA combination responsible for the production of insulin in human and replacing the DNA of a single-celled organism with that DNA. The insulin that comes out is IDENTICAL in EVERY WAY to the insulin produced by a non-diabetic human.
I've noticed that a lot of the arguments against human insulin presented by the appalingly ramshackle IDDT are highly emotive rather than scientific. The fact that their central argument seems to rest around a poorly written article from the Daily Mail, a third-rate reactionary rag with an offensively right-wing outlook on life, is just plain embarrasing. The whole 'debate' is simply this ridiculous paranoia that people have about 'Frankenstein' foods/medicines, which itself was whipped up by the Daily Mail a few years ago in an effort to boost sales. I'm going to come out and be offensive and simply say the sad fact is that the majority of people are just too stupid or ill-informed to understand what GM actually means, but thankfully my generation will be far more informed and able to make rational decisions based on science rather than emotions since GM is now part of the GCSE syllabus.
The fact that the Daily Mail article did its usual trick of taking the most extreme examples and portraying the people involved as saints, demonising Britain's first left-wing prime minister since 1979, and then trying to make out that arcane organisations are controlling out lives, suggests to me that the writer of the article had no clue as to what they were talking about and were deliberately trying to incite paranoia. See for yourself at http://www.iddtinternational.org/dailymail.html
There is no way I am buying into this human insulin fear since I have been treated by it since I was diagnosed and have had no problems until I was put on Lantus. I can understand why older members may have reservations, since, as I said, there are obvious problem with the switch from animal to human because of the relearning involved. Lantus is a different matter since before it was released it had been noticed that a higher percentage than normal had experienced allergic reactions so I'd say that it's not a perfect insulin, but that doesn't take away the fact that Humalin I and Humalog work absolutely fine.
I'm not going to comment on Joe's individual case since I have no right to but I would say that, since I have had problems switching from Humalin I to Lantus, it's only fair to say that those switching from animal to Lantus will suffer even more. For the record, though, people might be frightened of putting GM insulin in their bodies, but I'd much rather take something made in a clinical environment which makes an identical insulin to the one I used to be able to make, rather than inject stuff from a dirty cow or pig's body into my blood.  | 
