There are a lot of fads, blogs, and strong opinions, and then there’s the Science Vs podcast, hosted by Wendy Zukerman, to break down what’s fact, what’s not, and what’s somewhere in between. Reaching out to share more details around the newest episode, which explores the complicated present and hopeful future in the fight against deadly snake bites - antivenom.
The episode speaks with GI Joe-style conservationist, Pete Bethune, who was bitten by a venomous snake in Costa Rica just before Christmas and made it to a hospital hours before he succumbed to the poisonous toxin -- Science Vs explores the bizarre way we make snake antivenom and what the future of antivenom production looks like.
In the episode, we will discover that each year around the world, snake bites
kill upwards of 100,000 people. Compare that to around 6 people killed each year by shark attacks.
Creating antivenom is a long and antiquated system that has been used for over 100 years that includes sedating snakes and coaxing their venom out by massaging (sometimes called milking) their venom glands Next, the venom is injected in small amounts into horses over a period of two months so that the horse’s body can build up antibodies to fight the toxin
Then,
the horse is drained of a few liters of blood - similar to a human
donating at a blood bank - and their blood is used as the base for the
miraculous antivenom drug!
Due
to global attention after the World Health Organization (WHO) named
snake bites the most neglected tropical disease in 2017, scientists are
hard at work to create a universal antivenom
that can hopefully be used to treat all snakebites.
This season on Science Vs, the podcast will go beyond its award-winning coverage of the coronavirus and delve into a variety of new topics ranging from a study of the cicada swarms to whether aliens could really exist to snake antivenom and much more.
Listen to the episode here.
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