Political Quotes

“Mr. President, Canadian historian Michael Bliss wrote in his 1982 book, ``The Discovery of Insulin,'' that ``[w]ith insulin, the stone was rolled away, and diabetes became a matter of the quality of life, not speed of death.'' For thousands of years, human beings have battled diabetes. When the pancreas stops producing insulin, all kinds of bad things happen--heart attacks, stroke, blindness, kidney failure, foot disease, foot amputations, small blood vessels throughout the body being impacted by that high blood sugar. In some cases, within months, individuals waste away, fall into diabetic comas, and die. All that changed about a century ago thanks to the work of four Canadian scientists--Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J.B. Collip, and John Macleod. These four men discovered how to extract, develop, and refine a pure form of insulin that could be injected into the human body. It changed the world. Thirty million Americans--almost 10 percent, 9.4 percent, of the American population live with type 1 or type 2 diabetes today. Of those 30 million, 7.4 million depend on insulin for their survival, but one- quarter of the people who depend on insulin for their survival have had to ration their insulin in the past year because of the extraordinary, over-the-Moon cost of this drug that was developed a century ago. Rationing the drug, and therefore producing episodes or enduring levels of high blood sugar, has extensive health consequences. It does a lot of damage.…”