Does anyone know how anti-venom is made, who makes it or where I can find further info?
Search under “antivenin.” (That’s what it’s called.)
Short version: Venom is injected into horses which develop antibodies that can neutralize the toxin. The horses’ blood is drawn, and the “antivenin” is separated from the blood and stored until needed.
I visited a snake farm in Bangkok where they raise snakes and milk them for the venom for this purpose and you can see them doing it. They are handled by guys who know what they are doing but it is still very dangerous and they do get bitten once in a while. I saw a guy handling and milking a king cobra. He had been bitten in the hand recently and was still recovering and yet he was fooling around with this snake.
The way they catch the cobra is they distract the attention of the snake with the tip of their shoe by moving it, and as the snake is concentrated looking down on the shoe, the guy grabs it from behind the hood with a quick swoop of his hand. Not much room for error.
Thanks Rysdad, I should have explained, I did know that that it was made that way at one time, thought there might be a better way now. I am curious to know how long does the horse have to invenomed to build up tolerance and produce anti-venom. What becomes of the horses. Who produces the product.
What got me to wondering is an old book entitled “The Snake”, which explained the horse thing and recent news of a shortage of anti-venom because of some gov’t health regulations.
There was a story about snakes and antivenin on Discovery News this week – as it turns out, there is only one company that makes the stuff for the US market. The report didn’t name the company specifically, but did say their production line is currently shut down, as it doesn’t meet FDA standards. Production is expected to resume sometime in 2001 – till then, hospitals are using existing stocks (I hope there’s enough – one snakebite victim profiled in the report required about 150 vials of antivenin, roughly twice what is typical of such bites).
The main point of the Discovery News story was that some venomous snakes in the US are apparently becoming more toxic, and that the current antivenin is less capable of doing the job. Scientists are already doing research on new antivenin formulations, but, as usual, they’re at least several years away from being market-ready.
And remember to always have your antivenin shipped by FedEx!
You gotta love the logic of this. A guy is bitten by a poisonous snake and is going to die unless he gets the antidote but then he is told “sorry, we closed the plant down because they weren’t up to standard and who knows what their products would do to you”.
Or did the FDA notify the snakes to stop biting until the plant resumes production?