[Miss Jade]

My mum said that she received a letter (she is getting my mail for me while I am here in the US) from Abbott stating that they are sending a new Optium Xceed Meter as it has been found there can be a problem with the current one- when setting the time and date, it is possible for the unit of measure to be inadvertently changed.

For those in the US - the this is the Precision Xtra meter. Has anyone heard a similar thing here?

Now my brain got ticking (as it occasionally does) and here is my thought - does this mean i can actually force my (old) meter that reads in mmol to now read in mgdl or whatever it is? Cool. This is something that I actually wished all the meters would do anyway.

I can see why they are replacing them though - in guess you could get a nasty shock if you suddenly went from 5.5 to 140 or something and give yourself too much insulin! Saftey first for all the people who might not realise that it had changed.

[JasonJayhawk]

It used to be in all meters that you could set the preference between mg/dl and mmol/L. It was the way of the land. Nobody thought twice about it -- it's just like selecting your preference for a 12 hour or 24 hour clock.

Then some lawsuit-happy people came around and started claiming that they "accidentally" changed from one measurement to the other, and then dosed their insulin based on their results. A handful of reports came in, which prompted Lifescan (first) to contact everyone about the potential to change. Other meter companies followed suit, and within the same week, we were having voluntary product notification messages mailed to registered users and posted in news bulletins and news articles all over the web.

Suddenly, the layperson became a bit stupider. Newspapers and TV media outlets picked up on this and made it a huge deal.

From that point on, meter companies have changed their firmware to lock in one setting or the other, depending on the country in which it is sold. I think that's silly, but the two most scary words in the English language are "lawsuit" and "inoperable." You'll have to divide or multipy by 18 to convert to what you want.