A 3-day-old infant weighing 1.3 kg was prescribed 1 unit of regular insulin. Each unit is a 327ml bag of insulin in liquid form – ie. the baby needed only 1ml once to twice a day.
Later by mistake, a pharmacy technician added more (about 100 units of regular undiluted insulin) into the baby’s prescription. The mistake was caught 2 hours later when the infant’s blood glucose measured 3mg/dL. Rapid treatment with dextrose boluses ensued, and the blood glucose returned to normal after 12 hours.
If the infant’s blood glucose was not measured in time, that may have been another needless death. The baby was already weak and premature. Whether it was due to the doctor’s unreadable handwriting or other reasons, it could have been a fatal mistake.
Errors like that are not uncommon; it’s estimated that about 40% of such errors go unreported.
Some doctors had in their personal family conversations referred complications arising of such errors as ‘Hospital-Acquired Diseases’ (no kidding).
It’s not only the insulin, there’s the glucose-lowering drugs too; insulin, intravenous (IV) and subcutaneous injections are all on the list of The Institute for Safe Medication Practices’ (ISMP) for "High-Alert Medications". Those are all potential to cause serious harm to patients when they’re given in error.
Diabetes means ‘sweet blood’. This sweet sticky blood if remains neglected long enough, can lead to blindness, cataracts, heart, kidney and liver diseases, and premature death. For babies born with Type 1 diabetes, sticky blood was already in his/her body before birth.
More than half (of diabetic sufferers) that I’ve observed in clinical environments, sadly (my mum being a patient herself) – had their arm or leg amputated. Or they suffer from hyperglycemia due to insufficient insulin production or insulin action.
Overall, it is estimated that 8% of the entire population of the United States has diabetes. The percentage of people suffering from diabetes in Singapore seems to be raising yearly although we are paying more for "better nutrition" and "better medical technologies". Or are we really?
In the USA for year 2007, an estimated $116 billion dollars were spent on direct medical costs and $58 billion dollars were spent on indirect medical costs (eg, disability). That is $170 billion dollars as estimated total health care for diabetic patients in the United States.
Due to complex individualized dosing and administration regimens, insulin is not a "one-size-fits-all" medication.
The good news is – diabetes is often successfully managed with lifestyle modifications.
In the next few days I will post about more of "hospital-acquired diseases" that are and are not associated with diabetes. (Like the WHO, I’d love to name this H1N1 HAD that’s been around for the past 10 years or so.)
Feel free to comment! 
