The pharmaceutical industry is depleting horseshoe crab populations along the U.S. Atlantic coast with limited accountability — and serious environmental consequences, NPR reported this week.
Drugmakers use a product derived from horseshoe crab blood to test vaccines, injectable medicines and medical devices before injecting them into humans. The product tests for the presence of endotoxins, a toxin found in some bacteria that can cause inflammation, fever, sepsis or death.
The horseshoe crabs’ bright blue blood contains a substance called limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL) that detects the harmful bacterial toxins and captures them in blood clots. No other natural substance is known to work as well to detect the toxins.
A synthetic alternative exists, but unlike in some other countries, U.S. regulators have not established standards for its use industry-wide.
That means the key medical test is dependent on a single animal, whose already precarious existence — the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 2016 listed horseshoe crabs in the U.S. as vulnerable to extinction — can be further threatened by events like the COVID-19 pandemic demand for mass vaccine production.
Hellbound and Down 