Blood Sugar Monitor

Few Americans appreciate the convenience of having access to a One Touch Blood Sugar Monitor. Such monitors are not difficult to obtain by going online, and they can often be obtained at a pharmacy. That is not the case in every country on the face of the globe. In Iran, for example, it is very difficult to find any supplier of a One Touch Blood Sugar Monitor. Moreover, the government policy has now made it even harder to shop online for such a device. That is because the government has now required its citizens to use a slower, almost out-dated method for obtaining internet access.On October 13, 2006, an AP news release announced the distribution of some fake test strips. The information on the boxes that contained those test strips left one with the impression that they had been made by the Johnson and Johnson Company. The fake strips were supposed to be designed to work with the One Touch Blood Sugar Monitor.

Those strips could be purchased by online shoppers visiting the web site of Life Scan Products. Most of the people who purchased those fake strips lived in Ohio, New York, Florida, Maryland or Missouri. The distributors who sent a possibly harmful product to the homes of innocent diabetics were these: Medical Plastics and Devices of Quebec and Champion Sales of Brooklyn.

One can safely assume that each purchaser of the fake test strips either owned, or knew someone else who owned, a One Touch Blood Sugar Monitor. Each purchaser expected the information obtained through the use of the test strips to reveal the correct information concerning the amount of glucose in the bloodstream of the test subject. Users of the One Touch Blood Sugar Monitor rely on the information provided by the test strips.

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) was justifiably troubled by news about the fake test strips. The FDA realized that a diabetic who failed to receive proper test results could eat the wrong thing. Such a person might, for example fail to obtain a needed source of natural sugar, such as that found in a glass of orange juice. That is what a diabetic must drink if his or her insulin level has caused a rapid depletion of the blood glucose.

That is one situation that the user of a One Touch Blood Sugar Monitor hopes to avoid. By the same token, a diabetic with a blood sugar monitor does not want to have too much glucose in his or her bloodstream. A diabetic with a monitor hopes to keep close tabs on how any ingested carbohydrates might have affected his or her blood glucose level.

Such concerns are normally alleviated by use of a monitor and test strips. Yet such concerns would obviously be increased upon release of information about the fake strips. That information told diabetics to be on the lookout for the following items: One Touch Basic/Profile strips with lot number 272894A, 2619932 or 2606346 and One Touch Ultra strips with lot number 2691191.

All of the above were sold in packages that had a count of 50 test strips. Packages of the Basic/Profile strips had information in English and French on the label. Packages of the Ultra strips had information in English, Greek and Portuguese on the label. None of the test strips in those packages could be trusted to deliver to the diabetic user correct information.

The FDA was intent on recovering as many fake test strips as possible.