How snake venom is collected and what does horses have to do with it (10 photos)

Place your bets on how many people die from snake bites per year? 137 thousand people! And 58 thousand of them are in India. Do you know how many snakes actually bite? Up to 5.4 million people.





That is, the antidote saves more and more people every year. Although it is not easy to obtain it, because to make the antidote you need to collect the venom of a real snake.

Where do you get snake venom?



Grabbing a large snake with your bare hands is a tradition in India.

There are many countries where there are many snakes in Asia. But the market is most developed in India. This is where a lot of them breed - nature allows it, and there are millions of willing catchers. Accepting snakes from the public is cheaper than running nurseries.



It’s warm in Inidia, which is why snakes and dogs are also active here!

Moreover, “domestic” snakes grow in nurseries, but you need to monitor the types of poisons and mutations of real, wild snakes. Russell's vipers, kraits, Indian cobras and Indian vipers are caught here - these are the most common venomous snakes in India.

How to get venom out of a snake

The poison is extracted from a living reptile, why kill if a little later you can take more poison from it? The snake is simply taken out of the enclosure and its head is pressed down so that it does not twitch and bite.



This is how they hold the snake, I actually feel sorry for the little animal

There is a special device for this - a plastic disk, but it looks quite painful for the snake. Then the snake’s head is pressed against an empty glass, and it releases poison into the glass from pressure and anger.

No, she can't help but get angry when she's treated like that! The poison works automatically because the snake sees the person holding it. It seems to her that she is biting the offender. Therefore, this process cannot be completely automated. There must always be a person who enrages the snake and must be bitten.



The snake gets mad and gives up its venom quota. There are some very annoying people working at this job.

This is a dangerous job because one snake's fangs can contain enough poison to kill 50 people.

The poison collected in a bowl is frozen and then lyophilized. Remember the medical emblem where the snake is wrapped around a cup and poison is dripping into the cup? The process hasn't changed much in a hundred years, so the coat of arms is still as relevant as ever.



Each snake's venom has its own shade; professionals can guess it by color

After freezing, all moisture will be drawn out of the poison at a temperature of -56 degrees. It will be stored longer this way, and all hazardous substances will be safe.

I feel sorry for the horse

How are snakes and horses related? It turned out that in the bodies of horses, antibodies to snake venoms are produced naturally. This was discovered back in the 1800s, albeit in a cruel way.



In some places they keep a lot of horses not for hippotherapy.

The inventor of the antidote, Albert Calmette, injected all the animals with a little poison and tested who would survive it better. Not everyone was worried, but the horses developed immunity to such injections.

And since then, horses are injected with a little snake venom, and then their blood is taken to study the antibodies in it. Some conduct experiments on live horses, and farm. corporations are buying blood with antibodies at prices up to $500 per liter.



You can easily get six liters from one horse, so count it

How much does it cost to escape poison?

In terms of the final product, this liter will produce a batch of vials with antidote at a cost of up to $20. And then comes commerce and marketing; in high-income countries, antivenoms can be sold for 39 thousand per bottle.



The poison is sublimated in the laboratory

But most people die from bites in India and Africa (the second place in the number of deaths - 30 thousand per year) precisely because of the unavailability of antivenom in small villages and forests. Many people do not have time to get to the hospital, and if they do, there may not be medicine there.



And a lot of Indians die because they didn’t care about safety precautions