Source: ChildrensHealthDefense.org
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.
‘A finite source with a potentially infinite demand’
Scientists discovered the horseshoe crab blood’s unique capacity in the 1960s, and in 1987, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the endotoxin test using horseshoe crab blood.
To meet Big Pharma’s growing demand since the 1990s, an industry exploded around the collection and bleeding of the animals. Today, five major corporations harvest the blood along the east coast of the U.S.
The companies harvest the animals when they come to shore to spawn. Crabs caught in nets from trawling and dredging fisheries are not subject to regulations, which creates loopholes that make it possible for the companies to harvest and kill more crabs.
Lab technicians pierce their hearts and drain up to half their blood before releasing the animals back into the sea.
LAL labs claim that the vast majority of crabs recover. But research shows the bleeding appears to make the animals more lethargic, slower and less likely to follow the tides like their unbled counterparts do.
As a result, 30% or more of them die and many others never make it to shore to lay the eggs needed to reproduce the population and that serve as food for a wide range of migratory birds and marine life.
Despite demands for industry regulation by environmental groups, some limited legislative protections and successful lawsuits limiting horseshoe crab harvests in a few key locations, the amount of blood harvested by the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry from the animals grows every year….