We have a story today, a woman who has been on dialysis for 21 years. That’s actually pretty impressive as mean survival time on the process is 9 or 10 years – renal failure isn’t curable, only the effects can be delayed.
She also tells us that Brexit might kill her. Which is a very odd insistence to be making. A lack of dialysis supplies could – would – most assuredly kill her. And if the Channel became 100 foot waves for months on end, or we went to war with mainland Europe – something we’ve tried and didn’t like very much – then supplies might well be interrupted and she, along with many others, might well indeed die.
But why would our not being members of the European Union cause this?
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] She says she is so concerned that she is prepared to go on dialysis strike outside Downing Street to drive home the dangers facing her and other home dialysis patients. Madeleine Warren needs a daily supply of 15 consumables including syringes, blood lines and acid fluid to allow her to conduct home dialysis five nights a week, but the supply is threatened in a no-deal scenario as half of the items are made in the EU. “If I can’t get my dialysis supplies, it would kill me,” said Warren, a former executive at Goldman Sachs. “If there was serious disruption to certain supplies and you couldn’t do dialysis, then within a week you could die.” [/perfectpullquote]We’re changing, mildly, a political arrangement. We’re not altering geography nor weather systems. More importantly, we’re not changing our own ability to purchase whatever from whomever we wish. At least, we’re not limiting such. In fact, we’re expanding the number of suppliers around the world we can potentially buy from without regulatory interference.
How is this going to mean a paucity of supplies?
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“While we never give guarantees, we are confident that, if everyone – including suppliers, freight companies, international partners and the health and care system – does what they need to do, the supply of medicines and medical products should be uninterrupted in the event of exiting the EU without a deal,” said the health minister, Stephen Hammond.[/perfectpullquote]The complaint here is that perhaps everyone will be idiots and not just carry on buggering on. And why should we all be idiots just because our President is no longer Jean-Claude Juncker? Can anyone explain why the assumption is being made that we will be?
The assumption is that a ban on the supply of medical supplies by the EU to the UK will be part of our punishment for daring to vote in “the wrong way”. The noticeably larger quantity of medical supplies from the UK to the EU will, of course, be unaffected because for us to retaliate in kind simply isn’t cricket.
AFAIK the world’s major supplier of dialysis equipment is the US, but it’s always possible that the NHS put it out to tender and even if the EU bid wasn’t cheaperer and betterer, it would have been granted preferred bidder status.
Almost the entirety of Remain terror stories are based on the presumption that we the British will actively choose to forcibly stop ourselves from buying the things that we ourselves want to buy.
“If you vote Leave the UK government will take tanks and blockade Dover!!!”
Or that our supine crony technocrats invent stupid rules to teach us a lesson in case by some miracle we actually leave with a no-deal Brexit.
I’m on dialysis., 3x4hr sessions /week. Everybody is different, but I’d expect to last a bit longer than a week without dialysis. As a life-style, there’s not much to recommend it, save that the alternative is so much worse. Quite frankly the objective of getting the hell out of the Second Soviet overrides any hyperventilating over the myth of restricted supplies of what are comparatively low-tech compounds available globally. Spares for the machinery might be a different problem,