Stripping Safely and What Medicare Has to Do With It

At this point, I won't try to repeat what others in the community have already said about the "Strip Safely" [http://www.stripsafely.com/] campaign other than to reiterate some of what I think are their key points, as I have a few points I think are worth noting.  The folks at diaTribe have a very well-written summary of what's at stake (see HERE).  Also, my friend Riva Greenberg discussed the recent move by Medicare in her Huffington Post column (see http://huff.to/13avkif for details).Let me take a step back and give you some relevant background which is important for my readers to understand the issues.Back in 2009, the New York Times reported (see the article at http://nyti.ms/Ddz7L) that the FDA had pressed the international organization, which happens to be the Switzerland-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) [http://www.iso.org/], which happens to set the standards on accuracy for blood glucose testing supplies that patients use to check their blood sugars.  The article noted that the FDA might press ISO to tighten them. The NYT also stated that if ISO refused to act, the FDA suggested it "may instead recognize other (higher) performance standards" on its own, according to a June 2009 letter from Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the agency commissioner.  Indeed, I personally helped lead the charge that we push our regulators to adopt the tighter standards (catch my post at http://goo.gl/uRPhG for details), something the FDA has no...
Source: Scott's Web Log - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs