As we overheat and degrade our planet, more people are set to come into contact, sometimes fatally, with venomous snakes. One man hopes to provide an unusual solution to this, after subjecting himself to 200 intentional snakebites to his body.
For nearly 20 years, Tim Friede, 58, allowed some of the most lethal snakes in the world to bite him so he could build up an immunity that could one day be developed into a universal antivenom.
This extraordinary and painful quest, undertaken by a window cleaner with no formal scientific training in the basement of his Wisconsin home, nearly killed Friede, almost cost him his leg and his fingers and at one point put him into a coma.
Friede’s sacrifices are now poised to help deliver a new, broad antivenom that may avert some of the 138,000 deaths and 400,000 disfigurements and disabilities currently caused each year by snakebites worldwide, most of them poorer people in developing countries across Asia and Africa. In total, as many as 5.5 million people globally are bitten by snakes a year.
Why let snakes bite him rather than extracting venom and injecting known quantities at lower (and safer) levels? That sounds like a remarkably stupid way to do this.
He could have been milking the snakes prior to having them bite him so he’d receive a smaller dose.
That’s almost even more stupid. Does he know how quickly they reproduce venom? Does he know what dose he’ll receive? It might even be too little.
This guy sounds well meaning, but stupid.
You think after 20 years of letting snakes bite him he doesn’t know how to do it correctly???
C’mon now. Use that brain.
I think he’s a lucky moron.
If it’s the same guy I watched a video about, that’s how he started. But he was doing it to build up a resistance so he didn’t die when bit, not to harvest antivenin.