Horseshoe crabs tested on for their blood: yes, alternatives exist

In the video, we hear the interviewee state that, today, “we cannot go without horseshoe crabs” to make vaccines, and even that there is “no alternative” and that “this is why half a million horseshoe crabs are captured and fished each year”.

These lies, broadcast to thousands of people, obviously made us hopping mad given that methods without these animals have existed for around fifteen years.

Monocyte activation tests*, which assess the pyrogenicity** of substances directly on human blood components, have been approved since 2006 and were included in the European Pharmacopoeia in 2009. And that is not all: since 2020, it has also been possible to use a synthesis reaction to guarantee the safety of the products being tested for future patients.

These recognised methods do not, however, force laboratories to stop using horseshoe crabs who are arthropods living on the seabed that are endangered now due to overfishing and the loss of their habitat. According to the report, horseshoe crabs - from whom 30% of their blood was taken - are released into the wild and marked so that they are not used for a second ‘sample’. Despite these minimal provisions, with this blood loss, half of them die as a result of this barbaric protocol.

Worse, despite the existence of methods that do not involve animal suffering, researchers sometimes persist in living in the past. We saw this in rabbits: the monocyte activation tests that could also replace the pyrogen tests carried out on them did not prevent France from testing on more and more individuals for these experiments between 2015 and 2019 and from killing them.

Faced with researchers’ relentlessness and generalised resistance on this subject, it is necessary for laboratories to use alternative methods to animal experimentation when they exist, for any information produced to highlight alternative methods, and for public authorities to fund research into them where they do not exist!

*Monocyte Activation Tests (MAT) measure the release of cytokines (molecules that participate in the activation of an immune response) with monocytes (cells present in the blood) while human blood is exposed to a trial substance.

**that which induces fever

Translated from the French by Joely Justice