For nearly 30 years, London-based reptile enthusiast and musician Steve Ludwin has been injecting snake venom—a practice that has almost killed him.
It may now help save thousands of lives, as researchers search for a new antidote based on his body's response to the toxic fluids.
"It sounds very crazy what I am doing but it turns out that it potentially has lots of health benefits," Ludwin, the tattooed 51-year-old told AFP in the living room of his home in the British capital.
Ludwin demonstrated his decades-old habit by firmly holding the head of a green Pope's tree viper—Trimeresurus popeiorum—and extracting a few drops of its venom.
Minutes later, he has injected the fluid into his arm using a syringe.
The scientists hope to produce cheaper anti-venom from the antibodies in his blood.
[Please note that this is very dangerous and Mr. Ludwin has almost died a number of times. Don't try this at home! - Ed]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by redneckmother on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:13PM (11 children)
Bill Haast. lived to be over 100 YO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haast [wikipedia.org]
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:20PM (5 children)
Yeah, he's a fool allright:
Kids here, Boy Scouts or not, are taught at a younger age which snakes are venomous and how to recognize them. A scout in the boonies should have known better. Baby venomous snakes are even more dangerous than adults in the sense that they lack control over their evenomation just as baby humans lack control over their bowels.
When I was a kid I caught a few non-venomous snakes by hand, and even that was unpleasant, because their teeth are like tiny shards of glass that get stuck in your skin and are a bitch to get out.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday November 11 2017, @08:05PM (4 children)
"When I was a kid I caught a few non-venomous snakes by hand, and even that was unpleasant, because their teeth are like tiny shards of glass that get stuck in your skin and are a bitch to get out."
What kind of snakes were those?
I caught a few myself, any kid did when/where I was, but I don't remember anything like that. Just little needle-bites, barely visible, definitely nothing left inside but traces of saliva. Of course you have to squeeze and wash that in case of infection. I didn't fool with them enough to get bit more than once or twice though. One nice thing about a dog family, if you see a snake, just whistle, it'll be taken care of in short order.
*(Relative to many other sorts of venomous snakes.)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 11 2017, @08:19PM (3 children)
Pussy snakes. But I was still educated enough at that age to recognize and not grab pit vipers.
Pffffhahahaha..."infection?" "Infection" to the logical American man is only a concern of those impaled by Punji sticks or inner-city knife-wounds. The fear of "infection" from scrapes or cuts less than an inch-deep is a holdover from 19th-century granny medicine.
(Score: 4, Informative) by martyb on Sunday November 12 2017, @02:41AM (2 children)
That line of thinking could get someone killed.
My skin split open near the end of one of my fingers due to dryness. I disinfected it with an alcohol wipe and applied a bandage. Repeated the cleaning and bandage-changing for a couple days. Continued to get worse as it started oozing. Soaked it with hydrogen peroxide and applied anti-bacterial ointment. Repeated several times a day. Continued to deteriorate.
Had the wound looked at by a doctor. Was put on strong, oral antibiotics. Same night, my arm swelled in size and became red and inflamed from the fingertip nearly to my shoulder. Saw the doctor first thing the next morning. Said I had to go to the emergency room and get an IV. Thought it was going to be just a pump me up and send me home kind of thing. Nope. "Oh no no no; you're staying here for a while."
They put me on last-line-of-defense IV antibiotics. Regular dosing around the clock. I was in the hospital for 3 days undergoing this regimen... when the infection started spreading even further. They cranked up the dosage and duration of the IVs. Finally, after 6 days in the hospital, I was released and able to go home.
Had I waited one more day, I would have died. From an infection forming in a wound that was less than 1/4 inch deep.
If your wound seeps puss and/or forms a reddened area around the wound, you owe it to yourself to have it seen by a medical professional... promptly!
tl;dr infections are for real and should not be taken lightly. They can happen even in the USA and it does not require "Punji sticks or inner-city knife wounds".
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 12 2017, @10:39AM (1 child)
> If your wound seeps puss and/or forms a reddened area around the wound, you owe it to yourself to have it seen by a medical professional... promptly!
Unless you don't have health insurance, in which case walk it off like a champ and feel the warm glow of satisfaction that you're saving a rich person money.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @02:06PM
Maybe you didn't read the above story - but you really can't NOT see a doctor for that type of wound. Figure out payment later - you are IN DANGER OF LOSING YOUR ARM AND LIFE.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:45PM (4 children)
From your link:
Doesn't sound like he did this, "this" being the purposeful self-injection of snake venom. I see the anecdotal relevancy to health, though.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Whoever on Saturday November 11 2017, @10:18PM (1 child)
How can he have the record for this? Or anyone? No one has survived a "deadly snake bite", because, if you survive the bite, it wasn't deadly.
Perhaps "bites by deadly snakes"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 12 2017, @05:04PM
Because if you did you'd probably consider it a deadly snake bite even if you survived... ;)
It might not have been a lethal snake bite but it would have been quite deadly.
(Score: 2, Informative) by redneckmother on Sunday November 12 2017, @04:53PM (1 child)
Haast did purposefully self-inject venom:
http://www.billhaast.com/serpentarium/immunization_snakebites.html [billhaast.com]
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday November 13 2017, @01:36AM
I wonder if extracting venom before these (and other) bites meant he received a significantly lower dose of poison than if he had been bitten by the same snake prior to extraction. I don't know shit about snakes, for all I know they could save enough venom that they were ready to give an equally lethal dose with their second bite.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:15PM (2 children)
Not a new concept. Though Rasputin and others used a similar method, this snake guy is much more a fetishist than a pragmatist, with maso and possibly sado components of his personality. Which, as a libertarian, I don't see as being a necessarily negative thing.
Me too. But you know what my secret is? Actually getting sick as a kid and not getting vaccinated for anything in the past 15 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:26PM
Ninjas inject poison. They just don't allow themselves to get paraded around by media.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 12 2017, @05:10PM
Did you get lucky with stuff like polio?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:15PM (11 children)
Why did he start injecting the venom to begin with? Did he expect health benefits?
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:28PM (3 children)
The pain and anticipation of the pain might help him get off. Or the danger. He might have gotten bitten once or got high and just tried it for the hell of it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:32PM (1 child)
This sounds like wild speculation.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 11 2017, @07:19PM
Or more likely projection.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday November 11 2017, @08:25PM
Or he couldn't afford crack?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 11 2017, @07:15PM (5 children)
Probably for the same reason that some beekeepers purposefully get stung from time to time.
The theory is that if you expose the body to a toxin that the body will figure out how to deal with it. And, there's good reason to be skeptical of it. Considering the various medical practices in various parts of the world, if this kind of thing worked, you'd think it would already have been determined to work and people living in snake infested areas would be doing it.
In this case, it's going to be highly dependent on the specific snake venom he chose to use, other venoms work in other ways and as such may or may not allow for this to happen.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday November 11 2017, @08:15PM (4 children)
If you are exposed to poison ivy with a large contact and you've never been exposed before you'll get a huge and very painful rash. If you start the season by rubbing a leaf very briefly on a small portion of skin, you get a much smaller rash that goes away quickly. Then go do it again, a brief rub on a small bit of skin somewhere else. The rash response will be significantly suppressed in comparison to the first time. If at this point, you get that large heavy exposure, it's not going to hurt you nearly as bad, nor nearly as long.
Of course if you can easily avoid the ivy entirely, that's a lot less work and even less pain, so it's no wonder that people prefer it.
Also, there are a couple of real problems. First off, even though it works with poison ivy, and it works with bee venom, and lots of other things, that doesn't mean the same logic works with all poisons. Some of them will just build up until they kill you. Very important to be sure of which type it is. Also, even with the right type of poison, the human body can react in more than one way. *Sometimes* you might start the season with the traditional little rub of ivy (and if you do it every year you may not be expecting any noticeable rash at all) and get exactly the normal to the usual result - it triggers a hyper-response instead. The best I can tell this is quite rare but no one seems to know why it happens or what triggers it, so again that's a good argument just to avoid the stuff instead, if you can.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 11 2017, @08:53PM
'Round these parts, we have Poison Oak instead. But yeah, thanks to Batman, we know that physical contact with plants can also be unpleasant.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 11 2017, @09:15PM (2 children)
No one knows anything about why poison ivy/oak causes the reaction it does and why they seem to only affect humans. It is another one of those extremely commonplace and interesting phenomena that researchers don't care to study, or funding agencies don't care to fund, for some reason.
Supposedly the best way to become temporarily "immune" (actually non-immune since the rash is an immune response...) is to let goats feed on the stuff then drink their milk. Watch out for the goat scams if you go looking to buy/sell//rent any goats though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 12 2017, @05:08PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urushiol-induced_contact_dermatitis [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 12 2017, @09:54PM
Yes? Please quote the part you think relevant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 12 2017, @05:34PM
I think they used to make snake antivenin this way but using horses. This guy is apparently a proxy for the rear end of a horse. If using humans to make antivenin has a commercial future, we're all at risk, especially immigrants, the poor, and the desperate. It's almost a good idea.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by legont on Saturday November 11 2017, @10:35PM
A couple decades ago there was an article in Playboy about a man in Texas with snake ranch. He was old and complaining that none of his many children wants to inherit it. He himself was bitten many times over the years by dozens of snake species. He survived even though had one hand completely paralyzed and other injuries. Anyway, for the subject, he said that he could retire years ago because his blood cost a small fortune as an antidote when the snake in question was unknown.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 12 2017, @12:16PM
Very old knowledge... [google.com]