NY Times - Anyone who gets a flu or Covid shot, childhood immunization, heart stent or hip replacement — and that’s almost everyone — is protected from exposure to potentially lethal contaminants known as endotoxins by a test that uses what might seem like an odd ingredient: the blue blood of the horseshoe crab. Endotoxins are a worry in medicine. They exist in the cell walls of certain bacteria and can be released when the bacteria break down or die. These toxins can send a patient into a tailspin of fever, chills, septic shock and death. To keep patients safe, pharmaceutical companies run roughly 70 million tests a year on injectable medicines and implants for the presence of these toxins with a substance called limulus amebocyte lysate. It is an extract of cells from horseshoe crab blood and can identify even infinitesimal amounts of the toxin by reacting with it. No other natural substance is known to work as well.
February 16, 2023
When horseshoe crabs are gone, we'll be in trouble
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
What this means is that the industry has to do a much better job of managing the harvest in Delaware Bay, where most of the commercial harvest takes place. They are supposed to take blood and return them to the water, but most of them die before they get back to the ocean. They need to do a MUCH better job of keeping them alive or maybe a totally captive system so they can leave the wild ones alone.
What this means is the commercial harvest of wild horseshoe crabs has to end. Go to a captive system and leave the wild ones alone or else there will be nothing left. And already the birds dependent upon horseshoe crab eggs are disappearing.
Post a Comment