New York – Tim Friede has been bitten by snakes Hundreds of times, often on purpose. Now scientists are studying their blood in the hope of creating a better treatment for snake bites.
Friede has had a fascination with reptiles and other poisonous creatures. I used to milked the scorpions and Spiders The poison as a hobby and kept dozens of snakes in his house in Wisconsin.
With the hope of protecting itself from snake bites, and what he calls “simple curiosity”, began to inject with small doses of snake poison and then slowly increased the amount to try to develop tolerance. Then he would let the snakes bitten him.
“At first, it was very scary,” said Friede. “But the more you do it, the better you get, the quieter you will put yourself with him.”
While no doctor or emergency doctor or technician, or no one, in reality, would suggest that this is a remotely good idea, experts say that their method tracks how the body works. When the immune system is exposed to toxins in the snake poison, it develops antibodies that can neutralize the poison. If it is a small amount of poison, the body can react before it is overwhelmed. And if it is poison that the body has seen before, it can react more quickly and handle larger exhibitions.
Friede has resisted snake spots and injections for almost two decades and still has a refrigerator full of poison. In the videos published on its YouTube channel, it shows brands of swollen fangs in its black mamba arms, taipan and water collection bits.
“I wanted to push the limits as close as possible to death where I am basically staggering there and then go back,” he said.
But Friede also wanted to help. He sent an email to all the scientists he could find, asking them to study the tolerance he had built.
And there is a need: around 110,000 people die of snake bite every year, according to the World Health Organization. And antivennene is expensive and difficult. It is often created by injecting large mammals such as horses with poison and collecting the antibodies they produce. These antivenenes are usually effective only against specific snake species, sometimes they can produce bad reactions due to their non -human origins.
When Peter Kwong from Columbia University learned of Friede, he said: “Oh, Wow, this is very unusual. We had a very special individual with incredible antibodies that he created for 18 years.”
In a study published on Friday in Cell magazine, Kwong and the collaborators shared what they could do with Friede’s unique blood: they identified two antibodies that neutralize the poison of many different snake species with the aim of producing a treatment that could offer wide protection.
It is a very early investigation: the antivenene was only tested in mice, and researchers are still years of human rehearsals. And although its experimental treatment is promising against the group of snakes that include mambas and cobras, it is not effective against the vipers, which include snakes such as Rattlers.
“Despite the promise, there is a lot of work to do,” said Nicholas Casewell, a snake bites researcher at the Liverpool Tropical Medicine School in an email. Casewell did not participate in the new study.
Friede’s trip has not been without his false steps. Among them: he said after a bad snake bite that had to cut part of his finger. And some particularly unpleasant copra sent it sent to the hospital.
Friede is now a Centivax employee, who is trying to develop the treatment, and is excited that his 18 -year -old Odyssey could one day save lives from the snake bite. But his message to those inspired to follow his steps is quite simple: “Don’t do it,” he said.
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