Warfarin Institute of America
Dedicated to Your Health Since 2000
The Legend of Warfarin
It's Rat Poison Isn't It?
During the late 1800s the pasteurization of milk became common. About this time, too, the railroads began to provide rapid and reliable transportation over long distances. Cities were also growing to huge population numbers. As a result dairy farms became a large industry This was particularly true in Wisconsin - America's Dairyland. Corn and alfalfa hay were the primary crops fed to cattle. Eventually there was not enough cropland to grow these crops. By the 1920s, it became necessary to find a crop that would be nutritious for the cows and grow on marginal soil. Sweet clover was imported for this purpose.
The smell of new-mown hay is due to a chemical called coumarin. Sweet clover contains a lot of coumarin. In addition it has more moisture than alfalfa. Consequently when the sweet clover was stored in silos, the heat and pressure caused the coumarin molecules to link up with each other into a chemical that was later named dicoumarol.
Dicoumarol is an anticoagulant. When the hay from the sweet clover was fed to the cattle the following winter the dicoumarol reduced the ability of the blood of the cattle to form clots. Consequently many cattle died from internal bleeding.
A Wisconsin dairy farmer named Ed Carlson became very irritated over the death's of his cattle. He loaded a dead cow and a milk can of unclotted blood into his truck and drover 100 miles in a blinding snowstorm to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. When he arrived he discovered that, "Them damn professors don't work on Saturday.". So he unloaded the dead cow and the milk can of blood, along with a note, on the steps of the agriculture school building. On Monday morning when Dr. Karl Paul Link, a microbiologist, came to work he discovered the items Mr. Carlson had left. Dr. Link suspected that there was a previously unknown bacteria causing an infection that led to bleeding. Eventually it was discovered that dicoumarol slowed the blood clotting process.
Dr. Link was not a medical doctor, he worked in the agricultural field. His interest was increasing farm yields. With this in mind, he turned to rodent control with his new chemical. In 1945 he was able to produce the chemical called warfarin. The name came from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the organization that funded the research. During 1951 the Korean War was being fought. A Navy recruit who evidently did not want to go to war ate about a pound of the warfarin rat poison in a suicide attempt. He was treated with vitamin K and made a full recovery. This led to the realization that warfarin could be used in humans to treat blood clots.
In 1954, warfarin was approved as a human drug. In 1955, President Eisenhower had a heart attack and was given warfarin. However, it wasn't until about 1990 that warfarin management became more of a science and less of an art. We now have several people alive after taking warfarin for up to 47 years. Many are doing well after 30 or more years on warfarin.
PLEASE NOTE: This is not just a fun story -- there is a report of a woman who was not taking warfarin but spread a warfarin-type rat poison weekly without wearing gloves or washing her hands afterwards. She evidently absorbed enough warfarin through the skin to cause a brain hemorrhage. (A drug interaction may also have been involved.) The authors state that there are three other cases of absorption of warfarin through the skin causing coagulation problems. Reference: Abell TL et al. Cutaneous exposure to warfarin-like anticoagulant causing an intracerebral hemorrhage:a case report. J Toxicol Clin Toxicol 1994;32:69-73.
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Last updated July 17, 2007