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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This extraordinary and painful quest, undertaken by a window cleaner with no formal scientific training in the basement of his Wisconsin<\/a> home, nearly killed Friede, almost cost him his leg and his fingers and at one point put him into a coma.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople said I was crazy, of course. Some people tried to stop me,\u201d he told the Guardian. \u201cI understood it was dangerous but people are dying from snakebites and I was pissed at that. I couldn\u2019t get that out of my head. I put my ass on the line and I\u2019m glad I did.\u201d<\/p>\n Friede\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n These numbers will climb, studies suggest<\/a>, as the climate crisis increasingly causes snakes and humans to overlap. Hotter weather alters the habits of snakes as well as people, sometimes bringing us into unwanted contact. On Sunday, a man was bitten<\/a> by a rattlesnake in California\u2019s Ventura county \u2013 the sixth person to be bitten by the species this year amid an unusually warm spring in the state.<\/p>\n Treating snakebites is complicated by the range of different antivenoms required for the several hundred species<\/a> that can significantly wound a human. But Centivax, a California vaccine company that Friede now works for<\/a>, is aiming to produce a near-universal antivenom using antibodies from Friede that he developed after being bitten so many times.<\/p>\n Friede was assailed by the venom of \u201cvery lethal snakes that would normally a kill a horse\u201d, said an admiring Jacob Glanville, chief executive of Centivax. A study last year found<\/a> that Friede\u2019s replicated antibodies can neutralize the toxins from 19 snakes in the elapid family, a group containing about half of all venomous species, including cobras, mambas, taipans, coral snakes and kraits.<\/p>\n A trial of this antivenom is set to take place on pets in Australia this year, before any use in humans. \u201cI wanted to make sure this all wasn\u2019t in vain, so that people couldn\u2019t say I was an idiot for doing this,\u201d Friede said of his biting marathon.<\/p>\n \u201cI knew I was immune and that I could help people bridge that gap, and sure as shit I\u2019ve done it. I wanted to do it for humanity, for people who are the brokest people on the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n Getting to this point involved a bizarre and almost fatal journey for Friede, who even after being bitten by a garter snake as a five-year-old did not shy away from the creatures as he grew up. Instead, from 2001 onwards, he took it upon himself to inject small mixtures of venom and saline hundreds of times to build up an immunity to different snakes before getting them to bite him, usually on the forearm or fingers.<\/p>\n Tim Friede (center) with his colleagues at Centivax. Photograph: Dr Jacob Glanville<\/p>\n \u201cFor me it was a puzzle on how to not die from snakebites. I wanted to work out a way to make myself immune,\u201d he said. Friede worked as a window cleaner for a living while forging a path as an amateur scientist with his collection of about 60 snakes kept in the basement of his house in Two Rivers, a small city in Wisconsin. The snakes were acquired from a breeder in Florida who shipped them to him in wooden crates, secured in zip-tied bags.<\/p>\n The experiment nearly ended in disaster in the first year \u2013 on 12 September 2001, Friede allowed himself to be bitten by a monocled cobra and then an Egyptian cobra, two of the most dangerous snakes in the world, in the same hour, causing him to collapse and slip into a coma for several days.<\/p>\n \u201cIf my neighbor wasn\u2019t there to call 911, I would\u2019ve been dead within 15 minutes,\u201d he said. \u201cI know what it\u2019s like to be almost dead. It\u2019s cold and dark, you can\u2019t talk, my body just froze up. I could still think and hear everything around me, though, which was a trip.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the reservations of his wife \u2013 they are now divorced \u2013 Friede almost immediately went back to building up his immunity to different snake species. He felt he wanted the authentic experience of being bitten to properly simulate what would happen in a real encounter with a snake.<\/p>\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t walk, my body was beat to shit and I thought about whether I should wrap this all up,\u201d he said of the period following his coma.<\/p>\n \u201cBut then I thought I just have to get better at this, that giving up wasn\u2019t fair to the people who have died. I came back from death so I didn\u2019t want to say I did this for six months and then quit. This game isn\u2019t for the weak-hearted.\u201d<\/p>\n Further brushes with severe injury and death occurred in the following years. Friede passed out with anaphylactic shock several times, one of his fingers turned black and was nearly amputated after being bitten by a rattlesnake before, most seriously, the venom of a monocled cobra caused muscles in his leg to start to disintegrate.<\/p>\n \u201cThe muscle just burst out of my leg. I had to cut it out with a razor blade,\u201d he said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t walk for two months afterwards. I almost said enough was enough at that point.\u201d<\/p>\n The pain of being bitten by a snake is \u201clike a bee-sting, but 1,000 times worse, it\u2019s just horribly painful and there\u2019s nothing you can do about it\u201d, according to Friede. Each venomous snake species carries its own risk but the worst, he said, are those such as cobras that deliver necrotic venom that eats away at the body\u2019s tissue.<\/p>\n In all, Friede received more than 200 bites, about half of them from mambas. A particular triumph for Friede was becoming immune to the most venomous of all snakes \u2013 the inland taipan<\/a>, a shy serpent that lives in semi-arid areas of Australia and rarely tangles with humans. This is fortunate, as the venom from a single bite of the taipan is enough to kill over 100 people.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a big goal of mine to beat a taipan. I spent four months preparing for it in order to build my immunity,\u201d he said. \u201cI knew if I beat that I could beat anything I put my mind to. I\u2019ve now been bitten 22 times by a taipan, so I can now say I can do that.\u201d<\/p>\n Friede, while working in construction and factory jobs, sent details of his experiences to various scientists but didn\u2019t find anyone who would make use of his findings until 2019, when Centivax hired him and started taking his blood in order to isolate his antibodies for the antivenom.<\/p>\n This point came a year after Friede, beset by a divorce and child-support payments, gave up the injections and bites. His basement is now free of snakes, and while his immunity will wane over time it is still remarkably high, as last year\u2019s study showed.<\/p>\n The upending of the world\u2019s climate, as well as human expansion into snake habitat amid shifts in urban development and farming, provides a sense of urgency to the work of delivering antivenom to many of the world\u2019s poorest people, who will be most at risk<\/a>.<\/p>\n This will take greater funding and and better logistics at a time when many international aid budgets are being cut<\/a>. A 2021 review<\/a> of antivenom resources found \u201cinsufficient manufacturing output to meet clinical needs, notably for antivenoms intended for use in regions with a scarcity of producers\u201d.<\/p>\n None of this, of course, is the fault of snakes. The animals usually want nothing to do with humans and only bite us in self-defense.<\/p>\n Snakes have an evolutionary history stretching<\/a> back more than 100m years, long before humans existed or the dinosaurs were snuffed out, and play a vital role<\/a> in ecosystems. The onus is on us to find a way to live together harmoniously.<\/p>\n