Friede has long had a fascination with reptiles and other venomous creatures. He used to milk scorpions’ and spiders’ venom as a hobby and kept dozens of snakes at his Wisconsin home.
Hoping to protect himself from snake bites — and out of what he calls “simple curiosity” — he began injecting himself with small doses of snake venom and then slowly increased the amount to try to build up tolerance. He would then let snakes bite him.
“At first, it was very scary,” Friede said. “But the more you do it, the better you get at it, the more calm you become with it.”
I like how even the dude says not to do this.
The real issue with ‘immunizing’ yourself against venoms is that you need to have enough antibodies ready to go in order to neutralize the relatively large amount of venom injected when the venom is injected. Just having the memory B and T cells isn’t fast enough, usually. That means you have to keep the antibody count high by continual injections. The typical ramp up time for antibodies is 14 days on first exposure, and 3-7 days on second exposures, pic from an old friend who teaches immunology courses. Compare that to the typical amount of time it takes for the venom to cause damage or kill you: something like 20 minutes for the black mamba (though it usually takes a few hours, per that article), 10 minutes for one of the deadliest rattlers (wow, I didn’t know 10 minutes, that’s fucking fast, though again, that’s probably on the small probability side and it usually takes longer), and generally within hours for most species.
I don’t know actual numbers for the amount of antibodies that are injected in a typical antivenin dose (see the last paragraphs of the methods section for how they measure serum concentration of antivenom), but I’d assume it’s a lot of significant figures. Antibodies average 150 kilodaltons, so you’d get avogadro’s number of them less 6 significant figures (so 6.023 x 10^17) or so to get 1.5g of the stuff (and I’m totally guessing here, sorry) which would probably be a decent amount to dilute through the vials.
Hopefully someone who works in a lab for antivenins can come in and give better insight into the amount of antibodies per dose.
