The Venezuela Crisis

Access to insulin has become a growing problem in the U.S. and around the world. It's absolutely terrifying. In the U.S. insulin prices are insanely high with diabetics basically working to pay for insulin. But poverty stricken countries are dealt an even deeper blow, and often don't have access to insulin at all.

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That is happening in Venezuela right now. In the past few years, type 1 diabetes has turned from a bad scenario to downright catastrophic in the country.

Some weird, round about reasons, such as the problem not being declared a humanitarian issue has prevented the country from receiving aid. There is very little insulin available and people are dying.

Families are often grateful when their type one children pass away. This sounds terrible, but there is more pain in seeing their children suffer. High blood sugar and DKA are agonizing, so it's a relief when they pass, because they aren't hurting anymore. Secondly, the family's income is freed up so they can purchase food, clothing and other essentials for their other children. Diabetes consumes the majority of the income of these families.

Insulin is first and foremost the main issue; but not being able to test blood sugar is a serious problem as well. People will often not inject their kids with insulin because they fear hypoglycemia, which could cause rapid death. Blood sugar testing strips are a rare find in Venezuela, and one of the few ways to access them is when inddividuals carry extras in their baggage while visiting.

Because their isn't enough insulin or testing strips, people are dying and developing severe complications that could be relatively easy and cheap to prevent. Insulin is not an extremely pricey medication to produce, we are paying for the tweaks and "adjustments" made to the patent. Older and perfectly effective insulin's are often discontinued.

What is happening here is completely inhuman; it's murder. Maybe the regular people in our society don't know about these travesties, so I'm telling you now. We have to raise our voices to fight for adequate care for diabetes and every other illness. They all matter. It doesn't matter if you aren't affected by the disease, because we aren't on separate teams here; we all want to fight for human rights.

"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person," that's a statement directly from the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Insulin means life's for diabetics, without it, we will meet a painful, certain death.

T1International is a nonprofit that fights for insulin access, and has created the famous #insulin4all hashtag. If you don't have time for anything else, speak out on social media with your opinions on this matter. Call for the United Nations (@UN) to declar a humanitarian crisis. You can also use the hashtag #VenezuelaSinInsulina to raise awareness about the urgent issues in Venezuela.

The insulin crisis is, and will later be strongly recognized, as one of the most at catastrophic, detrimental medical issues of human kind. Not because it's more significant than other illnesses, but because we have the tools and medications to prevent suffering, but are denying people of it. Raise your voice. Diabetes doesn't wait.