Recently there is news about the big break through in the research on the time line of the interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals. Since I am one of the unfortunate ones that happen to get the “Neanderthal” gene leading to diabetics, I am naturally very interested in such news.

Here is the original article from National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141022-siberian-genome-ancient-science-discovery/

Here is quote from the original text:

“Genetically, the thigh bone’s owner appears equally related to modern-day Asians and Native Americans. Surprisingly, he appears to be about as closely related to them as to the 24,000-year-old Siberian boy or Stone Age European hunter-gatherers dated in other ancient DNA studies, notes paleoanthropologist Henry Harpending of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who was not part of the study.

Of modern groups, the Ust’-Ishim man is less closely related to Europeans, perhaps because today’s Europeans owe some of their ancestry to farmers who migrated there from the Middle East more than 10,000 years ago.”

When Fox News retweets about the story,
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/10/22/neanderthals-and-humans-first-mated-50000-years-ago-dna-reveals/

This is how they put it:

“Genetic analysis of DNA from the bone revealed this man was equally closely related to present-day Asians and to early Europeans. ”

Come on–Fox, the damned stupid bone was discovered in Siberia, the other side of the Caucasus Mountains, so isn’t it natural that it is more closely related to the East Asians than modern day Europeans? Why do you have to bend science like this–out of what? Some modern day inferiority complex?

LifeScan’s customer service people are very efficient–they got back to me in just one day. After checking my personal information for 7 minutes, and then asking carefully about serial no of the blood sugar monitor and lot number of test strips, the first question they asked is, “what makes you want to test your blood sugar more than once?”

It is kind of funny, because at $1.5 per strip, I guess not many people can afford to do sanity checks like I did. Definitely not grandmas and grandpas who are on social security and medicare. And when your doctors/nurses/educators told you that you do need to test your blood sugar regularly and it is the best for you, who would doubt them? Even Mayo Clinic said so!

With all the fuzz about biosensing, and all the advance in technologies, when can we have a more reliable method for testing blood? That will be a real ‘disrupting’ innovation–one that will not only destabilize a 174 Billion a year existing industry, but also benefit hundreds of millions of people around the world, including many people you know and maybe even your own grandma!

By the way, even though Mayo Clinic’s website never mentions how inaccurate these blood sugar tests are, American Association of Diabetes Educators clearly have done some research work, and here are the results they have dug up.

Here is a summary: even though that FDA only requires the glucose meters to show results within -25% to 25% of the true values for 95% of the times, most of these monitors fail to meet the standards in independent studies though they do get approved by the FDA. That means, for a person with a blood sugar of 100, it only requires the readings to be in the range of (75, 125) and they still fail it.

There is a new ISO standard coming requiring the monitors to be in the range for 99%, and FDA refuses to adopt it.

I decided to take dieting the data science way and went out and got myself a blood sugar monitor, a One Touch Ultra Mini. Since some of my friends have been using One Touch for more than 10 years and really trust the brand, so I started to take tests without actually checking for the precision/error range of the equipment.

Definitely not the smart thing to do. In less than a week, I found something is seriously wrong with the readings I got. It started with one morning that I felt hungry only 3 hours after breakfast and decided to give my blood sugar a test.

The first number came out is 101, which was very suspicious. So my scientific training kicked in, and within 5 minutes, I took 6 readings from the tip of the same finger and got the following vastly different range of numbers:

10:52am 101
10:53am 88
10:55am 97
10:56am 96
10:57am 106
10:57am 95

The mean is 97.17, and the Standard deviation is only 5.52. Not that bad, LifeScan might argue. But the problem is that the monitor is one-reading only device. The range of the readings here is almost 18. If the number is 78, is number in the normal range as it suggested, or it could be 67 or 89? The first would mean the person is definitely going into hyperglycemia.

One the other hand, if the reading is 94, that number would mean that the person’s blood sugar is within the normal range, but adding the errors, the truth could be somewhere around 105, means he or she is definitely pre-diabetic.

By the law of large numbers, it is more likely that what I got is a normal blood sugar monitor than by the 0.1% almost negligible chance, it is a faulty one that skipped through all those supposed quality checks. So the conclusion we can draw here, is that, these blood sugar tests are extremely inaccurate.

Giving the amount of money that the health care system is spending on these test strips and monitors, I would rather say, that it is just a damn rip off by those pharmaceutical companies on the American public and the rest of the world.