Today is World Diabetes Day, and we cannot help but remember his needless loss. Every day in Haiti, we encountered the problem that killed him: Manufacturers of glucometers would give them away like free candy, and sometimes a half dozen would be scattered across the hospital. But they were useless because the test strips were always out of stock.

Glucose test strips are a major source of the profit derived from diabetes testing supplies. Conglomerates like Roche, the leader of the $8 billion a year diabetes testing industry, have made these strips proprietary — in other words, each strip fits only into a specific machine. While glucose test strips cost pennies to make, the branded strips sell for 50 cents to one dollar per strip, and diabetics who depend on insulin typically use several strips per day.

In Haiti, we would sometimes deplete an entire box of 50 glucose strips on a single sick patient who required frequent monitoring. This precious box was often ordered months in advance; it took up to six months for the order to go from the district to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, and on to the United States, and then for the shipment to arrive in Haiti, clear customs and be transported from a central depot to a peripheral one and finally to our hospital. When a box ran out, we rarely knew when the next would arrive. And by that time, manufacturers might have changed their models, and stopped manufacturing strips for the glucometers we had.

For sites like ours, which rely on donated supplies, ensuring that glucometers and test strips are from the same model and manufacturer has been virtually impossible. That mismatch is often the missing lifeline for patients like Jean-Paul.

The solution is simple, and one that many diabetics have been urging for decades: Create universal test strips that will work in any available machine, in the same manner that USB cables can link nearly all brands of computers and devices. Universal test strips would lead to cheaper strips and increased availability. This would ensure that diabetic patients in places like rural Haiti could monitor their own blood sugars, and local clinics and hospitals could effectively screen for, diagnose and treat diabetes. Patients like Jean-Paul would know their sugars were too high because of an infection, and come in to the hospital before it was too late.

Instead, we watched as nurses disconnected Jean-Paul from the intravenous tubing that night and carefully pulled a sheet over him so his father could carry his body out of the hospital.