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Mike Mitka

JAMA. 1999;281:121-122.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Eli Lilly and Company stopped manufacturing mixed beef-pork insulins in October of last year. This means only human-based insulin will be available in the United States, and that scares 43-year-old Lucy Hartley.

Hartley, of Buies Creek, NC, is an insulin-dependent diabetic who has used Lilly's Iletin-I beef-pork–based insulin for 32 years. Ten years ago, her endocrinologist switched her to Humulin, Lilly's human-based insulin.

Diabetes patients used to injecting themselves with animal-based insulins will soon be switching to a human-based product.

"The results were disastrous," she recalled in a letter sent to JAMA. "The changes in my overall feeling of well-being were immediate. The experience I had with Humulin was negative overall, ranging from loss of what had been relatively good diabetic control, to feeling ‘strange' in general, to experiencing the more serious hypoglycemic ‘unawareness' episodes. In 20-plus years with diabetes, I had never lost consciousness because of . . . [Full Text of this Article]