Why horses are bled and left to die to produce diphtheria treatment

If you were to contract diphtheria today, you would be injected with an antitoxin made with blood from horses, many of which are kept in horrific conditions in India. Steve Boggan investigates

Using horses to harvest the serum has been going on since the 1890s (Peta)

Thin and bedraggled horses, their hides caked in faeces, their skin covered in abscesses, some blind from disease, others lame and ulcerated, line up to be bled. Thick needles are inserted into their veins. Their blood pumps out, faster from the young and strong than from the old and weak, and is collected.

To the men doing the bleeding, the temptation is to take too much because this blood has value. The antibodies it contains are responsible for all but wiping out one of the greatest scourges known to humankind – diphtheria.

So revolutionary was this medical miracle – this harvesting of a serum that could cure humans of the disease – that it earned its creator, the German physiologist Emil von Behring, the first Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1901. Thanks to Von Behring, hundreds of thousands of lives a year would be saved – millions over time.