Word: warfarin
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...fight the rodents, the ancients used cats. Modern societies have tried potent poisons like strychnine and zinc phosphide. Trouble is, they not only kill rats but friendly animals and unwary human beings as well. In 1947, a better weapon appeared: an anticoagulant called warfarin. In small doses, it does not harm large animals. But when a rat swallowed it, it caused internal bleeding and death, usually within five days. For about 25 years, man felt he had the rat on the run. No more. British health authorities have discovered that brown "house" rats (Rattus norvegicus) in Wales and black "ship...
...discoveries made in their laboratories. Indiana University holds the patents on Crest toothpaste, Rutgers on the drug Streptomycin. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation at the University of Wisconsin provides the university with over $2 million annually, much of it derived from royalties on inventions made in the Foundation labs. (Warfarin, a leading rat poison, is the best known of these...
Perhaps still more potent, and still relatively safe, is the anticoagulant drug warfarin. Less than 1/500th of an ounce is enough to make an adult rat die of internal bleeding. Ironically, the brown rats' white kin in laboratories helped University of Wisconsin researchers develop warfarin anticoagulants as lifesavers for men and killers for rats...
...still widely used for long-term treatment of thrombosis patients, because it can be given handily by mouth. But the Wisconsin labs have synthesized more than 100 related substances, and one of these, Link suggested, would make a safe and deadly rat poison. He was right. Named warfarin,* it is usually applied to bait grain. Unsuspecting rats keep on eating it, eventually die of internal bleeding. In the U.S., said Link last week, 70,000 tons of warfarin-poisoned bait have been used without a single human death and with few accidents...
Best Testimonial. Physicians who had no objection to using a drug made from rotted clover that killed cattle were more wary of one touted as a rat poison. But warfarin, believes Chemist Link, is the best anticoagulant now available: it can be used in smaller doses than dicoumarin; it can be given by mouth, by injection or rectally. It works fairly rapidly, and an overdose can be promptly canceled with a form of vitamin K. Best testimonial to its safety: Chemist Link disclosed that warfarin is the anticoagulant (unnamed by Press Secretary James Hagerty) that President Eisenhower has been taking...