Find love or die trying steam11/6/2023 ![]() It's also arguable medicine manufacturers aren't the biggest problem facing horseshoe crabs: in America many more are killed for fishing bait and lots are struggling in Asia because their habitat is disappearing. A small percentage of them die after being bled, although medicine producers are becoming ever more careful about keeping population numbers healthy. For instance, America still bleeds many crabs every year. Synthetic ingredients and alternative tests are not yet widely used in some countries. Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company developing one of the biggest potential Covid vaccines, said they won't be using crab blood in their jab. It is likely that a new Covid test manufactured in the UK will use synthetic ingredients, which are also approved by the European Union. ![]() Some governments, including the Japanese and Chinese, have approved the rFc test for use. This genetically engineered protein is called Recombinant Factor C, or rFC. The fourth is the American horseshoe crab ( Limulus polyphemus) which lives along the east coast of North America, with a particularly large number going to the beaches of the Delaware Bay to mate each year.įor years, no one managed to find any alternative ingredients to use in a test that were as sensitive as crabs' blood.īut there is hope: in the late 1990s biologists at the University of Singapore realised that a synthetic alternative could be created in a lab by cloning a molecule in the crab blood. These are the tri-spine horseshoe crab ( Tachypleus tridentatus), the coastal horseshoe crab ( Tachypleus gigas) and the mangrove horseshoe crab ( Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda). Three of them live in Asia, around the coasts of India, Vietnam, China, Borneo and southern Japan. There are four species of horseshoe crab. And since we'll want to vaccinate millions of people in a short space of time, horseshoe crabs could play a big part. In many parts of the world, researchers will be relying on horseshoe crab blood in those important tests. The successful jabs will have to be carefully checked before they are rolled out. More than 100 different vaccines are being tested in the hope that one will work. ![]() The world is rushing to find a safe vaccine to fight Covid-19, the viral lung disease which has swept the planet.
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