🌍 Profit over patients?

TGIF! Today, we treat you to a word-of-the-day experience. Today’s word is switcheroo (swuch-er-oo), meaning a surprising change or reversal. The word was found to be most commonly used by employers on Fridays around midday when their employees would surprisingly stop picking up their calls or replying to emails.

Thankfully, our boss won’t see this (we removed him from the mailing list), but what’s still surprising about that?

— Chibuike Uzor, Tayo Davies

South Africa runs short of insulin pens as weight loss drugs take over.

As if always passing up on ice cream wasn’t hard enough, life as a diabetic just got tougher.

South Africa’s public healthcare system is nearly running out of insulin pens. These devices, used to administer insulin beneath the skin of people living with diabetes make life easier for both patient and doctor due to their accuracy.

However, Novo Nordisk, the company responsible for making and supplying these pens to the South African government, has opted out of their supply contract due to “manufacturing limitations,” or better put, “our priorities lie elsewhere.”

Less weight, more sugar. Injectable drugs for weight loss: Wegovy and Ozempic (also manufactured by Novo Nordisk) are sold in single-use pens, the same pens used for injectable insulin. And their blockbuster status means they are more profitable to make and sell than insulin.

For context, a pen dose of Ozempic sells for about $1000. In contrast, one pen insulin dose sells for between $2 to $3.

Back to the basics.

This means that most South Africans will now have to revert to administering their daily insulin using syringes and vials. While this may look innocent, adequate dosing is more difficult using syringes and could cause serious side effects if the insulin is overdosed or underdosed.

Foresight? It all makes more sense when you find out that Novo Nordisk signed an agreement with South African drugmaker Aspen to manufacture human insulin on their behalf -in vials- through 2026.

Zoom out. With 80% of diabetics living in low—to middle-income countries, South Africa was the only one (up until now) supplying insulin pens in the public service. -CC.