56. Snake Venom

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things

Episode 56: Snake Venom

Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Network)
Date: July 13, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode dives into the hidden world of snake venom: the science, economics, and life-saving logistics behind antivenom production. Host Zachary Crockett explores who collects venom, how antivenoms are made, why they're so expensive (especially in the US), and why millions still die or are disabled from snakebites worldwide—despite clear solutions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Human Side of Snakebites

• Personal Story: Dr. Sean Bush, an emergency physician and venom expert, recounts his own son’s terrifying rattlesnake bite and the harrowing medical cases he’s witnessed.
  • Quote (Sean Bush, 01:44):
    “People coming out of the helicopter just with total body twitching and just, you know, this bizarre, almost alien-like thing that's just very scary. Bleeding and not breathing and bruising and their whole body's swelling.”
• Takeaway: Even in expertise-rich environments, venomous bites are deeply frightening, but quick access to antivenom can mean survival.

2. Snakebites and Their Threat

• US Context: Venomous bites are rare but extremely costly. Only 20 US species are venomous enough to threaten humans, mostly pit vipers (e.g., rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths) and coral snakes (06:07–06:38).
• Snake Venom Mechanics: Pit viper venom is highly destructive.
  • Quote (Sean Bush, 06:25):
    “You start to digest from the inside out. There's a lot of proteolytic enzymes, a lot of things that denature proteins that help the snake to digest food as it swallows it whole.”

3. Busting Medical Myths

• First Aid Fact vs. Fiction (07:11):
  • Tourniquets, “venom extractor” kits, and the old “cut and suck” Boy Scout method are not only ineffective but can worsen outcomes.
  • Key advice: Go directly to the hospital for antivenom—“the only effective thing you can do.” (07:20)

4. How Antivenom is Made (07:27–13:00)

• Venom Collection:
  • Jack Vicente of Agritoxins describes hunting elusive coral snakes, the delicate “milking” process, and low yields.
  • Quote (Jack Vicente, 08:14):
    “For two years, I drove from St. Cloud to Okeechobee, north to Lake City...Every time somebody found a coral snake, I would go get it.”
  • Market prices range from $300–$6,000 per gram, with coral snake venom fetching the highest price (09:47).
  • Quote (Jack Vicente, 09:47):
    “A coral snake is a $6,000 snake...if the snake's hard to get and hard to keep alive and gives a very small yield, that's going to cost more money.”
• Antivenom Manufacturing:
  • Example: CERB Pharmaceuticals (Crofab). Venom is purified in Wales, injected into sheep in Australia to produce antibodies, then antibodies are extracted and processed for US hospitals (11:00–12:11).
• Economics of Production:
  • Wholesale price per vial: $3,800 (12:31).
  • Quote (Steve Anderson, 12:45):
    “There's not really a super cost-effective way right now to develop antivenom. To do one trial...can cost a company...five to $10 million.”

5. The High Cost for Hospitals and Patients

• Limited Stock: Even at major medical centers, cost is a barrier (13:08–13:36).

  • Quote (Sean Bush, 13:26):
    “Hey, Dr. Bush, it sure is expensive to stock 200 vials of crofap. That's really expensive. Do we really need all that crofap?”

• Patient Bills: US hospitals charge much more than wholesale: $15,000+ per vial, with severe bites requiring 15+ vials (14:05–14:10).

  • Notorious bills:
    • $68,000 for four vials for a child (14:19).
    • $200,000 for 12 vials for a teenager (14:37).
  • Quote (Nick Brandehoff, 14:45):
    “I think, to be blunt, it's bloated costs. Right?”

• Insurance Gaps: Most insured patients pay little out of pocket, but the uninsured face ruinous costs—especially among at-risk migrant workers (15:39).

  • Quote (Nick Brandehoff, 15:39):
    “Do you want to financially bankrupt somebody based on this treatment?”

6. The Global Antivenom Crisis (18:59–23:39)

• Scale of the Problem:
  • 2.7 million affected worldwide annually; 80,000–140,000 deaths (19:06).
  • Disproportionately affects Southeast Asia and Africa due to healthcare shortages.
• Supply Shortages:
  • Antivenom makers “pulled out” from Africa as it’s not profitable, causing huge gaps (Sean Bush, 19:38).
  • In 2020, only 1 million doses produced, well below global need (19:53).
• Local Solutions:
  • Indian firm Premium Serums makes polyvalent antivenoms (~1.5 million vials/year) for as little as $8 a vial (20:22, 21:22).
  • Quote (Nitin Deshpande, 21:06):
    “A single product covers the bites of 24 species of poisonous snakes found in sub Saharan Africa.”
  • Non-profit Asclepius Snakebite Foundation—$100–$200 successful treatment costs in Africa (22:06).
  • Training local staff and increasing access cuts mortality from 30% to less than 2% in Guinean clinics (22:43–22:55).

7. The Future of Snakebite Treatment (23:01–24:31)

• Scientific Advances:
  • Work on an antivenom pill and lab-synthesized antibodies could make antivenom affordable and scalable (23:01).
  • Quote (Sean Bush, 23:18):
    “It’s going to revolutionize snakebite treatment...you’re going to be able to afford anti venoms right now. You got to use a host animal...It’s so expensive to make.”
• Changing the Game for Collectors:
  • Biotech may end the “snake milking” business (23:39–23:48).
  • Quote (Jack Vicente, 23:48):
    “The venom business as we knew it and know it today is on its way out…before long they know...we don't need to [milk] venom anymore.”
• The Collector’s Perspective: Vicente, himself recently bitten, is glad for the coming changes—even if it means the end of his business (24:25–24:59):
  • Quote (Jack Vicente, 24:31):
    “It was a significant coral snake bite…used four vials of antivenom from Costa Rica. Worked well, but I did stay in the hospital for two days...As you get into this full time, you realize I don't want to get bit again. Number one, it hurts. Number two, it's expensive. And number three, you need all your fingers and hands to keep doing it.”

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• Sean Bush (on snake motivation, 05:19):
  “It's biologically expensive for a snake to bite a human...the last thing it wants to do is strike at you and expend venom that it could be using to eat.”
• Jack Vicente (on venom business, 10:22):
  “Venom liquid gold...But if you look at the venom producers that do this full time, they're not driving Ferraris.”
• Nitin Deshpande (on affordable antivenom, 21:32):
  “We price our product economically for that particular region.”
• Nick Brandehoff (on cost/benefit for uninsured, 15:39):
  “Do you want to financially bankrupt somebody based on this treatment?”

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Content Summary | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:01 | Dr. Sean Bush recounts his son's rattlesnake bite | | 03:34 | Venom Week conference overview | | 05:19 | Why snakes rarely bite people | | 07:11 | Snakebite myths and only effective treatment | | 07:27 | How antivenom is made (collection process) | | 10:22 | Venom economics: pricing and 'liquid gold' | | 12:31 | Wholesale cost per antivenom vial explained | | 14:19 | High-profile US snakebite hospital bills | | 19:09 | Global snakebite death/disability stats | | 20:22 | Polyvalent antivenom solutions for India/Africa | | 22:43 | Massive drop in Guinea snakebite mortality from increased access | | 23:01 | Future breakthroughs: pill forms and biotech antivenom | | 23:48 | Jack Vicente on the end of live venom collecting | | 24:31 | Vicente’s (the collector) own recent snakebite |

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Conclusion

This episode skillfully dissects the understated but urgent global health and economic crisis of snakebite. Through stories, science, and sweeping price contrasts, we’re shown both the hurdles and hope: antivenom remains out of reach for millions, but innovations and low-cost efforts point toward progress.

Zachary Crockett’s journalistic lens, paired with vivid voices from doctors, collectors, and aid groups, reveals the tangled web (and high price) behind each life-saving vial of antivenom.

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything.

[Narrator]

Back in 2006, Shawn Bush had one

[Zachary Crockett]

of the most terrifying experiences of his life. It involved his son Jude, who was 2 years old and a Southern Pacific rattlesnake.

[Sean Bush]

We lived in the snakiest plateau in all of Southern California because I liked it there. I like to live where the snakes live, right? My son was in the backyard and he saw a little juvenile, little baby rattlesnake coiled up next to the water sprinkler. And he tried to pick it up and put it in a cage for me. It bit him between his thumb and index finger.

[Zachary Crockett]

Bush is an emergency physician who specializes in treating venomous snakebites. He'd seen this situation play out many times before.

[Sean Bush]

I'd seen a lot of really sick people after rattlesnake bites. People coming out of the helicopter just with total body twitching and just, you know, this bizarre, almost alien like thing that's just very scary. Bleeding and not breathing and bruising and their whole body's swelling.

[Zachary Crockett]

Fortunately for Jude, his dad knew exactly what to do and he ended up being okay.

[Sean Bush]

I told my wife at the time, I said, Call 911. I'll meet him on the helipad. I had anti venom ready to go. I had it in my hand.

[Zachary Crockett]

Venomous snakes bite millions of people every year, causing tens of thousands of deaths and many more amputations.

[Narrator]

In the US venomous snakes are fairly rare. When they happen, there's only one thing

[Zachary Crockett]

that can disable the toxins. A snake antivenom. But antivenom can be hard to find and extraordinarily expensive.

[Nick Brandehoff]

In the United States, it's not uncommon for a snakebite treatment with hospitalization anti venom to get up into the $100,200,000 range easily.

[Narrator]

For the Freakonomics Radio network. This is the economics of everyday things.

[Zachary Crockett]

I'm Zachary Crockett.

[Narrator]

Today, snake venom. Venomous snakebites may be rare in the

[Zachary Crockett]

United States, but there's a passionate community that studies them. Doctors, scientists, herpetologists and enthusiasts.

[Narrator]

In early June, many members of that community met up for the 9th annual

[Zachary Crockett]

Venom Week at the Durham Convention center in North Carolina. We took a trip out there to join them.

[Sean Bush]

I think that's a good intro. A song about rattlesnakes. Hey, good morning, y', all, and welcome to Venom Week.

[Nitin Deshpande]

Wow.

[Zachary Crockett]

This year's event featured talks on topics like rattlesnake relocation training, the economics of

[Narrator]

snake bite care in Nepal, and really

[Zachary Crockett]

nerdy stuff like snakebite induced thrombotic microangiopathy in the Brazilian Amazon.

[Narrator]

Out in the hallway, pharmaceutical companies and

[Zachary Crockett]

nonprofits from all over the world set up booths. There were even a few snakes on site.

[Sean Bush]

I rescued this snake out of someone's yard. This, if I remember correctly, this is the snake that bit my neighbor and that we found. She's very chill. She's a happy copperhead.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Sean Bush, the emergency doctor.

[Narrator]

He's the president of the North American

[Zachary Crockett]

Society of Toxinology, which organizes Venom Week. We sat down with him after he delivered his opening remarks.

[Sean Bush]

Here we talk a lot about snakebite, but we also talk about spider bite, scorpion stings, mass envenomations by bees and wasps.

[Zachary Crockett]

Bush was raised in Central Texas and

[Narrator]

first got interested in snakes after being

[Zachary Crockett]

given one as a child.

[Narrator]

By the age of 10, he was

[Zachary Crockett]

wrangling prairie kingsnakes, coach whips and cottonmouths into a special snake bag, a pillowcase embroidered by his grandmother.

[Narrator]

Today, he's one of the country's foremost

[Zachary Crockett]

experts in snake venom.

[Narrator]

He says snakes really don't want to bite you. They use their venom to digest food,

[Zachary Crockett]

and deploying it comes at a cost.

[Sean Bush]

It's biologically expensive for a snake to bite a human. They gotta make that venom, and that's metabolically expensive, especially to a cold blooded animal like a snake. The last thing it wants to do is strike at you and expend venom that it could be using to eat.

[Zachary Crockett]

Worldwide, there are more than 3,000 species of snakes. Around 600 of them are venomous, and only 200 are venomous enough to kill a human. Of those 200, roughly 20 are located in the US and almost all of those 20 fall into two camps. There are coral snakes, which typically have black, yellow and red stripes. And there are pit vipers which include rattlesnakes, copperheads, and cottonmouths.

[Narrator]

Every snake breed's venom is a little different.

[Zachary Crockett]

Some contain neurotoxins that can paralyze you and prevent you from breathing. Others affect the blood, causing clots or hemorrhaging.

[Narrator]

Pit viper venom is necrotic.

[Zachary Crockett]

It breaks down your flesh like food in a stomach.

[Sean Bush]

You start to digest from the inside out. There's a lot of proteolytic enzymes, a lot of things that denature proteins that help the snake to digest food as it swallows it whole.

[Narrator]

If a bite isn't treated within a

[Zachary Crockett]

few days, or in some cases, hours,

[Narrator]

it could result in amputation, kidney failure, or even death. Now, there's a lot of bad advice

[Zachary Crockett]

out there on what to do if you get bit. Some people recommend strapping a tourniquet around the bitten area. Others sell kits that claim to remove the venom with a little plunger device. Then there's the old boy Scout's method

[Narrator]

of taking a swig of whiskey, cutting an X over the fang marks, and

[Zachary Crockett]

sucking the venom out with your mouth.

[Narrator]

These methods do not work and can even be harmful. The only effective thing you can do is go to a hospital and get

[Zachary Crockett]

an antivenom, a drug derived from antibodies that bind to the venom and prevent further harm.

[Narrator]

There are different antivenoms for different snakes, and making one of them is a

[Zachary Crockett]

long and complicated process.

[Jack Vicente]

My name is Jack Vicente, and I'm the owner operator of Agritoxin's venom production laboratory in St. Cloud, Florida.

[Narrator]

In order to make antivenoms, manufacturers need snake venom itself. Agritoxins is one of only a few

[Zachary Crockett]

businesses in the US that extracts snake venom. It specializes in coral snake venom, which it sells to the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

[Jack Vicente]

I think I could probably produce more coral snake venom than anybody.

[Narrator]

At his lab in St.

[Zachary Crockett]

Cloud, Florida, Vicente has around 60 coral snakes.

[Narrator]

Getting them was not easy.

[Jack Vicente]

They're subterranean, they live underground, they're hard to catch. You have to happen upon them. So for two years, I drove from St. Cloud to Okeechobee, north to Lake City, and both sides from Tampa to Jacksonville. Every time somebody found a coral snake, I would go get it.

[Narrator]

Getting venom out of them is even tougher. Snakes can only be milked every two

[Zachary Crockett]

to three weeks, and they can be pretty fickle.

[Jack Vicente]

You don't pin a coral snake because they spin. So you just gently take them out and reach down and grab them behind the head. Some of them come out and they're in a bad way. You run them into a clear tube and then you back them out of the tube into your hands. Very carefully.

[Narrator]

Vicente presses each snake's fangs against a

[Zachary Crockett]

non absorbent fabric stretched out over the top of a test tube. The process yields a few drops of liquid venom.

[Narrator]

That liquid is then purified and freeze

[Zachary Crockett]

dried into a powder.

[Jack Vicente]

Even the smaller snakes can give 3 to 4 milligrams. The bigger snakes that I've got can give 18 to 20 milligrams in one bite. It just barely covers the bottom of a 15 milliliter test tube. A six foot eastern diamondback can give as much venom in one bite as it would take about 150 coral snakes to give. Some big eastern diamondbacks give 700, 800 milligrams a bite.

[Zachary Crockett]

Producing a single gram of powder might require milking 125 snakes, but antivenom manufacturers pay top dollar for the effort.

[Jack Vicente]

It can go anywhere from $300 a gram to $6,000 a gram, depending on the snake that you're collecting it from. Your bigger rattlesnakes and bigger vipers are down in the hundreds of dollars. A coral snake is a $6,000 snake. Generally speaking, if the snake's hard to get and hard to keep alive and gives a very small yield, that's going to cost more money.

[Narrator]

Vicente says the U.S. market for antivenom is so small that most manufacturers only

[Zachary Crockett]

buy a few hundred milligrams at a time.

[Jack Vicente]

You hear the phrase venom liquid gold. And if you could sell every bit that you, you probably could make a lot of money. But if you look at the venom producers that do this full time, they're not driving Ferraris. The only way you're going to make money with venoms is if you tie in one of the bigger contracts. One of the two or three big antivenom companies that will buy volume from you.

[Zachary Crockett]

There are only a few manufacturers of antivenom in the U.S. pfizer is the sole producer of North American coral snake antivenom for rattlesnakes. There are two products on the market, Anavip and Crofab.

[Narrator]

The latter is made by a company

[Zachary Crockett]

called BTG International, which is owned by CERB Pharmaceuticals.

[Steve Anderson]

I'm Steve Anderson. I'm the emergency medicine business unit lead for CERB Pharmaceuticals.

[Narrator]

CERB buys pit viper venom from a

[Zachary Crockett]

private lab in Florida, but it also

[Narrator]

has more than 1,000 snakes in its

[Zachary Crockett]

own facility in Salt Lake City.

[Steve Anderson]

We have four different species of snakes that are indigenous in the United States. The western diamondback, the eastern diamondback, the cottonmouth and the Mojave rattlesnake. They all have different venom profiles that we try and cover.

[Narrator]

The company takes all that snake venom

[Zachary Crockett]

and sends it to a lab in Wales to get purified. Then it goes to Australia where it's injected into sheep. Those sheep develop antibodies, blood proteins that bind to and neutralize the toxins in snake venom.

[Narrator]

After around 18 months, the blood is

[Zachary Crockett]

drawn from the sheep.

[Narrator]

The antibodies are harvested from the blood and then shipped back to whales for

[Zachary Crockett]

another round of purification before being packaged as antivenom.

[Steve Anderson]

And then once we have enough antibodies from the sheep, that's prepared and then comes back to the United States for distribution.

[Narrator]

Trofab is often distributed to big medical

[Zachary Crockett]

wholesalers like McKesson, who sell it to hospitals all over the country.

[Narrator]

And all that work it took to produce the antivenom is reflected in the price.

[Zachary Crockett]

The wholesale price for a vial of snake antivenom is around $3,800. That's partly the cost of production. Milking the snakes, infecting the sheep, harvesting the antibodies, and partly the cost of

[Steve Anderson]

R and D. There's not really a super cost effective way right now to develop antivenom. I mean, what people don't realize, you know, to do one trial, it can cost a company, depending on the size of the trial, anywhere between five to $10 million.

[Narrator]

That high price means that for many hospitals, buying antivenom is a challenging cost benefit decision. Sean Bush used to work at Loma

[Zachary Crockett]

Linda University Medical center in California.

[Narrator]

There were so many snakebites there that the cable channel Animal Planet made a

[Zachary Crockett]

reality show about it called Venom Er.

[Narrator]

Bush says that even the decision makers

[Zachary Crockett]

at a venom hotbed had trouble justifying the anti venom stock.

[Sean Bush]

They were like, hey, Dr. Bush, it sure is expensive to stock 200 vials of crofap. That's really expensive. Do we really need all that crofap?

[Zachary Crockett]

We reached out to Loma Linda and they said they always have a reliable stock of antivenom on hand, regardless of the cost. But the same can't be said for every hospital.

[Sean Bush]

Smaller hospitals can barely afford to stock enough to treat one patient. And urgent care can't afford to stock anti venom.

[Zachary Crockett]

The costs are even harder to swallow for patients. Hospitals might charge $15,000 or more per

[Narrator]

vial, and a severe bite might require

[Zachary Crockett]

15 of these vials.

[Narrator]

Hospital bills for snake antivenom often make

[Zachary Crockett]

headlines for being so outrageously high.

[Narrator]

In 2018, a family in Illinois was

[Zachary Crockett]

billed $68,000 for four vials of antivenom after their nine year old daughter was bit by a pit viper at a summer camp. That didn't include the $58,000 helicopter ride to get to the hospital.

[Narrator]

A South Carolina teenager who was bit by a copperhead a few years ago

[Zachary Crockett]

received a $200,000 bill for 12 vials. Those charges are many times the wholesale price.

[Nick Brandehoff]

I think, to be blunt, it's bloated costs. Right?

[Narrator]

Nick Brandehoff is an emergency physician and

[Zachary Crockett]

toxicologist based based in Colorado. We met him in the hallway at the conference.

[Nick Brandehoff]

I think that most physicians don't realize the cost or are uncomfortable talking about the cost with patients. In my practice, this is one of the few times I do have a risk benefit discussion with patients about costs because it's really expensive. You're talking about what could be the cost of a house when you start the treatment process.

[Narrator]

For many people, the bulk of the

[Zachary Crockett]

cost will get covered by insurance.

[Narrator]

That South Carolina family that was billed $200,000 for instance, only ended up paying

[Zachary Crockett]

$175 out of pocket for the antivenom.

[Narrator]

But for the uninsured, that's not the case.

[Nick Brandehoff]

For a while I was working in the Central Valley of California. There's a lot of migrant farm workers who get bitten in the fields. That's a very frank discussion with them regarding how much this is going to cost. It's like, do you want to financially bankrupt somebody based on this treatment?

[Zachary Crockett]

That's a wrenching decision. Fortunately, in the US it's a relatively rare one. There are fewer than 10,000 venomous snake bites in the US each year and on average only five result in death. But abroad, it's a different story that's coming up.

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[Steve Anderson]

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[Jack Vicente]

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[Narrator]

Globally, as many as 2.7 million

[Zachary Crockett]

people are affected by venomous bites from snakes each year.

[Narrator]

The World Health Organization estimates that those

[Zachary Crockett]

bites kill between 80,000 and 140,000 people,

[Narrator]

and they cause around three times as

[Zachary Crockett]

many permanent disabilities like amputations.

[Narrator]

Many of these bites happen in Southeast

[Zachary Crockett]

Asia and Central Africa, poor regions where health care can be hard to find.

[Narrator]

If antivenom is expensive in the us, Sean Bush says in poorer countries it

[Zachary Crockett]

can be entirely unobtainable.

[Sean Bush]

Right now the shortage is in resource challenged areas like Africa, and that's because companies that made antivenom for Africa, they just pulled out, it wasn't profitable and so they just stopped making it.

[Narrator]

In 2020 anti venom manufacturers produced around

[Zachary Crockett]

1 million doses of product, well below what's needed to treat the number of venomous bites.

[Narrator]

India and Africa have some of the

[Zachary Crockett]

highest snakebite death tolls in the world, largely due to lack of access.

[Narrator]

One company trying to change that is

[Zachary Crockett]

premium serums and vaccines based in Pune, India. Nitin Deshpande is a business consultant with the company who was at Venom Week.

[Nitin Deshpande]

We've got the top two products are for Asia, which is India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, that region. Then we got something for sub Saharan Africa, and then we have one specifically for Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria. We are producing close to about a million and a half vials of anti venom every year.

[Narrator]

The products that premium serums make are polyvalent.

[Zachary Crockett]

Each antivenom neutralizes venom from many different species of snakes.

[Narrator]

This is important because India and Africa

[Zachary Crockett]

have nearly 100 venomous snakes, including cobras, vipers and mambas.

[Narrator]

And people who arrive at the hospital

[Zachary Crockett]

often don't know what species they were bitten by.

[Nitin Deshpande]

A single product covers the bites of 24 species of poisonous snakes found in sub Saharan Africa. One single product.

[Narrator]

Polyvalent antivenoms often come with a few more side effects, but they save lives

[Zachary Crockett]

at a much more affordable price.

[Narrator]

On Indian e commerce platforms, you can find premium serums anti venom for as

[Zachary Crockett]

little as 700 rupees, or around $8 per vial.

[Nitin Deshpande]

We price our product economically for that particular region.

[Zachary Crockett]

Deshpande isn't the only person working to expand global access to antivenom.

[Narrator]

Also in attendance at Venom Week was

[Zachary Crockett]

the Asclepius Snakebite Foundation.

[Nick Brandehoff]

The mission basically is to save lives in areas that don't have almost any care right now.

[Narrator]

Again, that's Nick Brandyhoff. He's the organization's executive director. He says it sources its antivenom from

[Zachary Crockett]

a Mexican manufacturer, which keeps costs low.

[Nick Brandehoff]

Our antivenom, we can treat a patient for about $100 in total. A severe envenomation is about $200. And so we're able to fundraise and effectively treat patients relatively cheaply as compared to in the United States. If somebody can't pay, we will pay for them. Or maybe they need four vials of anti venom versus just two, but they can only pay for one. We'll cover the three.

[Narrator]

The organization has worked to set up

[Zachary Crockett]

snakebite centers in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Conga Brazzaville, where local staff is trained to administer this antivenom.

[Narrator]

In guinea, where a clinic was opened in 2019, the results have been astounding. Brandyhoff says that among people who are bit, snakebite mortality has dropped from 30%

[Zachary Crockett]

to less than 2%.

[Narrator]

Advancements are also happening on the science side.

[Zachary Crockett]

Researchers are working on an antivenom pill that would be much more affordable than intravenous treatment.

[Narrator]

And there are ongoing efforts to synthesize

[Zachary Crockett]

antibodies in a lab without the need for a sheep or a horse. Sean Bush is excited about that approach.

[Sean Bush]

It's going to revolutionize snakebite treatment because you're going to be able to afford anti venoms right now. You got to use a host animal. It's got to be in Australia or something with these sheep. And then you gotta like purify it and all these things. So many steps. It's so expensive to make.

[Narrator]

Jack Vicente, the venom collector who runs Agritoxins in Florida, thinks these shifts could

[Zachary Crockett]

eventually render his services obsolete.

[Jack Vicente]

The venom business as we knew it and know it today is on its way out. In the next 10 or 15 years, or certainly in the next 20, I don't think there'll be a lot of people grabbing snakes, collecting venom. It'll be like labs where they can make their own chemical that they got from the venom. All the venoms that are being collected are being cataloged or being stored. You know what's in them and they look at the genetics and everything and before long they know they can figure out, oh, this protein is what I want, that we don't need to venom anymore.

[Narrator]

But even though it could put him out of work, Vicente is looking forward

[Zachary Crockett]

to a world with more snakebite treatments. Especially after he recently got a bite of his own.

[Jack Vicente]

It was a significant coral snake bite and used four vials of anti venom from Costa Rica. Worked well, but I did stay in the hospital for two days. As you get into this full time, you realize I don't want to get bit again. Number one, it hurts. Number two, it's expensive. And number three, you need all your fingers and hands to keep doing it.

[Narrator]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and

[Zachary Crockett]

Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson.

[Narrator]

And a special thanks to our listeners,

[Zachary Crockett]

Chloe Vasquez and Amanda Hartman for suggesting this topic. Does Marriott know there's snakes on premises?

[Sean Bush]

I didn't like Super Advertise, but I did tell them. I did email them. They know. They know there's snakes.

[Narrator]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the hidden side of everything.

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[Zachary Crockett]

Telehealth through Walmart?

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Who knew?

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Oh, I'm gonna say C. Walmart.

[Jack Vicente]

Correct.

[Zachary Crockett]

Walmart can connect you with 24. 7 virtual medical care.

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