U.S. Vaccine Industry Harvesting Blood from Horseshoe Crabs
For many decades, the blue colored blood from horseshoe crabs has been harvested for purposes of medical research and for quality control and safety testing in vaccines, prosthetics and intravenous drugs. Their eggs are also a staple food for a shorebird bird known as the red knot, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered […]
Vaccines Rely on Horseshoe Crab’s Blue Blood for Purity
Every spring, 500,000 Atlantic Horseshoe Crabs are collected by four biopharmaceutical companies as they crawl to the mid-Atlantic beaches to lay their eggs. The helmet-shaped arthropods are placed upside down on a rack, and a sterile needle is inserted near the heart to collect about 30 percent of their blood.1 2 The crabs are returned […]
