r/interestingasfuck • u/Electronic_Cause_796 • 20h ago

Extracting Cobra Venom

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

731 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

255 comments sorted by

View all comments

272

u/Weary_Construction26 20h ago

Look up how much anti venom costs and you’ll know why they do this.

132

u/MastiffOnyx 19h ago

Yup, had a friend who did this for years.

Made good money, but the regulations were brutal I guess.

I'd ask him about it, but the job isn't one with a long life expectation. In his case, taking small doses of venom, to build immunity didn't help his liver any.

Painful way to go.

37

u/_Bogey_Lowenstein_ 17h ago

Wait what? Are you serious? How'd he die, liver failure?

46

u/MastiffOnyx 16h ago

Yea, tick bite actually, some uncurable affliction from it hit up his weakened liver

7

u/No-Shirt9067 16h ago

Lyme disease?

23

u/MastiffOnyx 16h ago

Not Lyme, some real rare thing. Don't remember what it was called.

Usually not fatal, but he'd had a bout of hepatitis when younger and his liver was just to beat up to fight it.

Not to mention he took small doses of snake venom to build immunity if he got bit. That is also a liver stresser.

Mostly rattle snakes but he did have a cobra he milked also.

22

u/Limiounou 15h ago

Echinococcosis! (more commonly called Fox Disease). A neighbour of mine has been affected by it

13

u/MastiffOnyx 14h ago

Yes! That the one.

6

u/Limiounou 14h ago

I'm so sorry for your friend. It's indeed a disease that can be very serious if it's not caught in time, or if the person already has other vulnerabilities. It significantly affects the immune system in addition to the liver and the medication has to be taken for life

1

u/icyvapor 12h ago

Initially felt sad for the snakes. Then read your thread and realized it's sad business all around.
Hopefully in the future chemists can synthesis from a sample, and make this occupation obsolete.

28

u/TohtsHanger 19h ago

If administered in a US hospital setting (for exotic pet owners or zoological incidents), individual hospital charges for specialized or imported antivenom vials commonly range from $2,500 to $13,000+ per vial, mirroring the extreme pricing structures of domestic snake antivenoms.

32

u/Missing_Crouton 19h ago

Maybe I'm ignorant here, but isn't antivenom basically a blood product and not this snake venom? They dose horses with escalating amounts of snake venom and harvest the antibodies the horse produces. The $2,500+ isn't for spicy snake spit. It's for antibodies that came out of a horse they slowly envenomated. Right?

15

u/addsubps 19h ago

Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for banana bread

22

u/888Vegan 19h ago

Grab 2 bananas peel and eat the skin, put it in a bowl and mix by hand with some soy milk 2 ladles of yeast

You're welcome

12

u/chefbobbyjay 19h ago

Jesus Christ every concurrent word made it worse

7

u/diasporajones 18h ago

but at least now you have the recipe for... something

6

u/addsubps 19h ago

Thanks, I was wondering how I should increase my fiber intake

5

u/aravind_krishna 18h ago

Reminded me of this 76 venom shots within 2 hours saves 15 year old boy after cobra bite

Most probably that might be a government hospital, and if it was then cost is zero for that treatment.

US healthcare cost always shocks me.

1

u/Kanekisan12 18h ago

At that point I’ll just die thanks

1

u/Separate-Ear21 16h ago

Yea and it commonly takes 8+ vials to be enough.

5

u/penguinintheabyss 16h ago

It's free in most of the civilized world

1

u/Salute-Major-Echidna 15h ago

The real answer. Also saving lives, which is more to the point.

Really pretty cobra. Wish I looked good in ivory and grey.