DALLAS, TX – Add another to the list: protamine. This antidote to heparin is on national shortage and warnings are being issued to hospitals nationwide.
Protamine comes from the sperm of salmon. At the largest salmon fish farm in the world, workers have been manually extracting protamine from salmon for years. Thursday they decided that they weren’t being compensated for their efforts.
Being a protamine farmer is a unique skill. One worker will put on a salmon-fish suit equipped with a self-containing underwater breathing apparatus or SCUBA. This worker will enter the water and start to swim around shifting their hips and batting their eyes, which have larger than scale eyelashes. While this is happening, a second worker will be dressed as camouflaged seaweed and sneak up behind the excited male salmon to manually extract the protamine.
This labor-intensive extraction process has saved millions of lives from heart surgery to heparin overdoses.
“Besides keeping live salmon in our pharmacy and attempting to manually extract the protamine ourselves I don’t know what we are going to do,” stated pharmacist Ken Hampton.
Since the strike in Dallas, reports are coming in that the salmon have never been more “ramped up, aggressive, and sexually charged.” No future end in sight for this protamine shortage.
No Neutral Protamine Hagedorn (NPH) or 70/30. What will be on VA formulary now?
Protamine is no longer isolated from the sperm.
Cardiac surgeons aren’t dismayed. They’ll just resort to using aprotinin or aminocaproic acid, never mind that they don’t work the same way.
Nice try, Lord Rockwell, but here is how it really goes down. I visited the salmon fishery on the Salmon River in Idaho and took the tour. The guide explained that his job was to find the most attractive female salmon and put her behind a screen in the pool. They then put 1000 male salmon on the other side of the screen who react as most men would after a $1000.00 Vegas lap dance. After the male salmon were done the water was filtered and sent to the bottling plant to make protamine. During the Q and A after the tour someone asked the guide how he knew which was the “hottest” female salmon. He explained that it was a previously undiscovered trait he possessed not unlike having perfect pitch. And for that he was paid $100.00 plus benefits.