Quick Hits: Wildlife Activists Target Big Pharma for Using Too Much Crab Blood

Each year, hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs are netted and drained of their milky-blue blood. It’s used for medical safety tests that detect bacterial contamination in drugs and implants. According to a recent Reuters article, activists from The National Audubon Society, Defenders of Wildlife, and other groups are pressuring the pharmaceutical industry to switch to a synthetic version of the blood, known as recombinant Factor C (rFC).