A great many forms of insulin are made from the pancreases – pancreii? – pancrasies? – of cows and/or pigs. And most cardiac operations involve the insertion of tissue from these noble yet tasty animals.
So…
Question 1: How do devout Jews/Muslims/Hindus feel about this? If it’s not OK to eat a pulled pork sandwich, is it OK to inject one’s self with pig insulin? Would a devout Jew rather deal with the health consequences than the spiritual ones? (I realize that the answer probably depends on who the patient is and how devout, etc.)
Question 2: Where do these animals come from? Are there special medical farms where animals are raised in controlled healthy conditions, or is Bessy from Farmer Brown’s beef farm used? And if the former, what happens to the rest of the animal? Is it likely that my insulin comes from the same source as tonight’s steak dinner and my leather jacket?
Well, at my job we do use pigs for some of our medical procedures and studies. These animals are raised by medical suppliers specifically for use in the medical industry. I would assume that any type of medical productions/testing uses animals from similar sources. There are a lot of FDA regulations about keeping track of exactly where the animals come from/what they are used for/their health statistics/their lineage etc. etc. I imagine it would be fairly difficult to document all that if you’re just pulling piggys out of Farmer Joe’s barn.
As to what happens to the corpse afterwards, we incinerate them here.
I’ll leave #1 for someone in the know.
I have wondered that too, and I don’t know. I know that a former b/f (sort of brought up Church of Scotland, but non-observant) felt, after a quadruple bypass, and the addition of a bit of piggy, that it would be strangely unfriendly and cannibalistic to eat bacon. And, come to think of it, I cannot specificlaly recall him eating bacon or pork, although memory might be cheating.
Health concerns trump all of the laws of Kashrut, as far as I know. If you’re starving to death and the only food around is pork, even the most orthodox Jew is allowed to eat it. I’d assume the same goes for insulin and other life saving injections.
Insulin is no longer obtained from cow or pig pancreases. It is actually obtained from cultures of E. Coli bacteria which have been genetically altered to be able to produce human insulin.
I’m currently designing a database app to track, among other things, insulin use. We have plenty of pork and beef on the menu. Semilente Purified Pork, Ilentin, Lente Iletin II, and Protamine Zinc all sound like they’d be good with BBQ sauce. Then again, we have to account for every possibility, so if a patient came in using purified pork, for instance, even though it is “illegal”, we still need to be able to track it.
According to this page and a few others I found by googling, cow and pig insulin originally just came from animals that were slaughtered for food, yessir. But of course some people had reactions to it, so nowadays, human insulin is produced directly from big vats of genetically engineered bacteria, and you have a much smaller chance of reacting badly to real human insulin than to cow or pig insulin.
Insulin is a special case. I do not believe that bioengineering has replaced cows and pigs as a source for heparin or pancreatin. These are still derived from food animals.
The Talmud is very clear on this. Leviticus 18:5 “You shall, therefore keep My statutes and My ordinances, which if a man do he shall live by them.” is interpreted as ‘living by them, not dying by them’.
IAMNAdiabetic, but it seems to me that the insulin injections prevent these people from going into comas or suddenly dropping dead.
On Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, adults are commanded to fast. But, the elderly, the ill, and pregnant women are not only allowed to eat, they are encouraged to do so.
AFAIK Islamic laws are even stricter on all things porcine than Jewish laws. I imagine they use bovine varieties when possible. Is there any medical product which comes only from pigs?
