Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Willie McBeans, the Adventure Queen. Ah.
In my life, I've been on countless incredible expeditions, explorations, and even an exploit or two. I've seen some things that would make you weep with joy, like the sunset over the Himalayas. I've seen other things that would make you hoot and holler with hilarity, like an elk with a tumbleweed caught on his antlers like a toupee made out of sticks. That was a good one. You know, it still gets me.
One time, I was in the desert in Arizona, hiking with some friends. I was so blown away by the gigantic cacti and stunning red rocks around me that I forgot to look where I was putting my feet, and I stepped on the tail of a baby rattlesnake that was basking in the sun on the trail. Yowch! That snake was as startled as I was and did what scared snakes do. It bit me!
It sure did hurt. The hike turned into a hospital trip, a doctor gave me a shot of some anti-venom medicine, and I felt better in a couple days. I never learned how that medicine worked, but I'm sure glad it did. Olivia was wondering about anti-venom too, so let's find out more from an expert. When you think about anti-venom,
First, you want to think about venom. My name is Emma Gerstenzang, and I'm a pediatrician in Philadelphia. Venom is poisonous. So what happens is the venom is circulating through your veins. It's in your blood. And you want to hurry your way to, you know, an emergency room. And they may be able to give you, depending on the kind of snake bite, something called antivenom. And antivenom is something that
binds up with venom. So if you imagine like a lock and a key, the venom is like the key and the antivenom is like the lock. And so if you have venom from your snake bite all in your blood, and then you get antivenom added, right, injected into your blood, or you're given antivenom, and now you have venom and antivenom in your blood, they meet like a lock and a key. The
Anti-venom sticks to the venom so that it can't attack your organs anymore, so that it can't go around and cause all sorts of problems in your body so that you don't get sick. A lot of medicines that we think about, like if you get sick with a virus or you get sick with an infection, if you have an infection from bacteria, you take an antibiotic and that antibiotic actually kills the bacteria.
Anti-venom does not kill venom. It doesn't get rid of the venom from your body in that moment. So the venom is still there, but the difference between venom and bacteria is venom is not alive. So it can't really be killed. And so you have to just wait until the poison is passed out of your body. But in the meantime, it's gets stuck together with the anti-venom so that it can't hurt you while it's still in your body. Um, uh,
So the anti-venom medicine has ingredients that do emergency cleanup in someone's body after they've been bitten by a snake. The anti-venom grabs all the little bits of the poison and holds onto them so they can't go hurting any of your insides. Your body eventually gets rid of the poison. That's pretty incredible.
But you don't have to worry too much about snake venom. There are more than 3,000 snake species in the world, and most of them don't make venom. Plus, snakes really don't want to bite humans. They'd much rather avoid us and mind their own business. Now I'm on to other adventures. I'm thinking, hmm, ocean voyage. No, no, no. Volcano voyage. Mmm, yes. Much more adventurous.
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If you have a question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to braindance.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then! Have you ever given a flying fish a high five? Life-changing and very wet.