[Music] and you can see there an absolutely massive yield and that amount of Venom there is enough to kill a couple of hundred grown men no worries Billy Colette is collecting Venom to help make life-saving medicine for snake bites these guys are literally one of the most toxic snakes on the planet millions of people suffer venomous snake bites every year around the world if you get bitten by a rattlesnake it's like having your hand smashed with a hammer the most common way of making antivenom i
s by first injecting snake venom into animals like horses and then drawing their blood but producing it is expensive and some parts of the world are facing a desperate shortage as many as 137,000 people die from snake bites each year we call these neglected tropical diseases and it's really important that we find ways to to solve it so why are animals still used to make antivenom and what can we do to solve this hidden Health [Applause] crisis this lab is one of the only places in Australia milk
ing snakes my mom in particular thinks I'm a lunatic because I wanted to do this for a job Billy cares for 300 deadly sneakes Coastal typ hands Eastern Browns tiger snakes common death adders and King Browns first he prepares the milking cup so if you went to a nightclub or a pub and you ask for a shot like Fireball this is what they give it into I know of a fellow that was bitten by a large Coastal typan within about 15 minutes he uh was showing symptoms um he was extremely nauseous vomiting sw
eating um and by the 20 minute Mark he was almost unconscious ious he was bleeding out of his eyes his gums AR orifice in his body he was in a coma for 11 days but he did survive that [Music] bite so this is a tiger snakes these guys are literally one of the most toxic snakes on the planet um and you can see I'm using the snake hook here to keep the head uh away from my hand and the rest of my body and when we're coming into the milking process basically I drop the hook like that I have the snak
e in my right hand we got a soft pinning pad there so this is basically like a foam mattress I got my pinning device which is a clear ppex disc what we do is we flick the snake onto the pinning pad like that apply the Pinner and I can see exactly where it head is and I can have my fingers right there ready to go and so that's the snake restrained and the next part is where I actually milk the snake so what he's going to do is he's going to think he's bitten me there we go nice yield there and th
at amount of Venom that's enough to kill over 50 adult men there are about 600 species of venom snakes around the world concentrated in these hot spots Australia is home to more than a hundred of them Australia's got more venomous snakes than nonvenomous snakes we're the only country in the world with that each snake's venom is made up of a unique cocktail of toxins that attack your body a king cobra's venom often goes after the nervous system and can kill a human in 15 minutes a Viper's Venom c
an stop blood from clotting and cause internal bleeding and in rare cases bites can stop your heart each week Billy milks over a hundred different snakes including this Coastal taian one of the most dangerous in Australia its venom could cause paralysis pin are so are so reactive um and they're so smart and calculated they do make me very nervous to work with and you can see there an absolutely massive yield and that amount of Venom there is enough to kill a couple of hundred grown men no worrie
s so once we milk the snakes we then freeze it um just in a basic freezer so the Venoms are soared with the different species and you'll notice topan Venom once it's frozen is actually pink so all the different species have actually got different colored Venom and down here we've got the tiger snake and you can see it's like a light yellowy sort of a color um Eastern Brown's clear the the king Brown is a really rich deep dark yellow like you can see here a few months later when we've got enough
together we'll actually freeze dry it we turn this on we set it to minus 56° C and basically it freezes freeze dries and draws all that moisture out within about 48 hours and we're left with this crystallized product freeze Dr Venom is easier to transport and last longer Billy says the Venom from his lab has saved over a quar million lives in Australia it's a huge weight on our shoulders but we're all extremely passionate and proud of the work we do [Music] here but snakes aren't the only animal
s needed horses are also key to making antivenom we're producing a medication so the horses need to be healthy need to be in a good body [Music] condition Mauricio guas is in charge of the farm run by Instituto picado Central America's only supplier of antivenom his team injects horses with small doses of Venom it's important they're precise too much could hurt the horse it's a very dangerous process we need to be really careful with everything that we do here the horses will begin to produce an
tibodies which will eventually become antivenom the healthier the horse the more antibodies they produce maio's team collects their blood blood every 2 weeks they wash and shave the horse's neck to prevent infection then they extract blood from the horse's jugular vein it takes less than a half an hour to collect 6 L just one blood bag is worth over $500 we separate the plasma and from the plasma we separate the antibodies and that's why you get injected if you get bitten by a snake scientists h
ave used horse blood to make treatments since the 1800s inspired by vaccine science of the era the French Dr Alber KET injected Cobra Venom into rabbits and horses he used their blood to make an early version of antivenom animals like horses are still used today because they have a lot of blood to produce antibodies at scale we're producing a medication that's able to save lives it's something that that's very appealing and very [Music] rewarding this lab 9 Mi away receives the plasma from the f
arm and converts it into antivenom that's safe to inject into humans it can protect against a wide variety of snakes but it doesn't come cheap I will say that the cost of production will be around maybe 15 to $20 something like that the lab produces roughly 120,000 vials a year they end up across the Americas and Africa depending on the snake uh we may require between 10 or 20 BS per person the sooner a victim is treated the more likely they are to survive and recover quickly it's a recovery Dav
id Williams of the World Health Organization knows well he has survived six snake bites in his life the product we used in Pap w guini we had a survival rate of nearly 99% but not everyone has access to Quality antivenom and as many as 137,000 people die from snake bites each year and there could be thousands more unreported every year there are an estimated 58,000 snake bite deaths in India alone The uod Cooperative collects most of India's Venom it pays its members to catch snakes nearly $30 f
or a spectacled cobra or about $3.50 for a saw scaled Viper seen here The Cooperative collects Venom from India's four most dangerous snakes which is Blended together to make one anti-venom but roughly 65% of India's population lives in rural areas far from City hospitals making it hard to get antivenom to victims in time the same problem exists in subsaharan Africa where as many as 30,000 people die a year from snake bites many victims don't go to hospitals so the data is hard to track as the w
orld doesn't look at this problem it is the poor person at the end of the line in the community that cannot afforded that's the person that's bitten before his death in 2019 royan Taylor dedicated his life to improving antivenom access for poor rural communities in Kenya there is a need for antivenom because we don't have enough antivenom [Music] now alv and's child was bitten in koui County Kenya about 100 miles east of [Music] [Music] Nairobi the county has to use a motorcycle ambulance to get
some victims to hospitals but not everyone gets medical help in time wend Alonzo's child died after a snake bit her in the middle of the [Music] night [Music] the Kenya snake bite research and intervention Center hopes to develop the first antivenom in East Africa no one has produced uh any kind of antivenom in Kenya we call it African PA this is the most common snake we come across in Africa it seems to bite many people it's also one of the most deadly on the continent in subsaharan Africa the
most effective treatment for a snake bite can cost more than $100 a vial and victims sometimes need more than 10 of them many of the people who get bitten of bread winners so you know if they're in a hospital bed their family's going hungry many victims couldn't afford treatments so some manufacturers stop producing antivenom for subsaharan Africa altogether today there's a dire shortage of quality antivenom the Kenya intervention Center has a database of Venom from local snakes but hasn't been
able to set up a horse farm or antivenom lab yet you need to have the land you need to maintain the land the pastures do all the the maintenance to set up an ad Venom manufacturing facility to the right specifications is going to cost somewhere between uh 10 and3 million us a few countries have greatly reduced their death rate rates thanks in part to government investment in Costa Rica just one to two people die each year from snake bites Australia's death count is just as low both countries ha
ve free antivenom treatment most places worldwide you have to pay for antivenom and it is unbelievably expensive so here in Australia we are unbelievably lucky that the government looks after us in that [Music] way these are some interesting ones yeah researchers like Maas spit and Bender are trying to make antivenom cheaper and more accessible his work is partly funded by the naturalis museum which preserves 30,000 snakes for research some of the jars are over 150 years old this is a really int
eresting species uh this is um this is the Russell Viper um and this is one of the species that is uh most heavily feared in in in India and also one of the species that we're studying in our [Music] lab Maus is researching ways to produce antibodies in a lab which would eliminate horses from the process and require less Venom from live snakes you're not using the animals uh as the factories to produce the antibodies um you could produce them in bulk in the lab so we're standing now in front of
our basically chamber Secrets uh and in here this is where we keep our snake Venoms he's studying how Venom affects the human cells in this well plate we have a Venom of a rattlesnake which we know is capable of destroying the [Music] cells we can see these like very prominent holes so you can imagine that when you get bitten by a rattlesnake and then their venom is caused to punch holes in your in your blood vessels then you will bleed out from the inside matius hopes his research will help sci
entists develop an oral tablet that would work on all snake bites it could be uh uh the holy Grill which makes it possible to neutralize the effects of all the different Snake species that would make it easier to get treatment to victims in rural communities hit hardest this is uh my hope um and to to be able to to study these magnificent creatures and their effects but also to to uh yeah to help the people that need it the [Music] most
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