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.
