Natural Resources

Brazil is blessed with natural resources, a huge and fertile country exporting vast quantities of food around the world. There is even oil under the rolling South Atlantic, but it doesn´t stop there.

New medicines, new drugs, are often based on chemicals found naturally in nature and few countries have more nature than Brazil. That flower deep in the Amazon may hold the cure for any number of diseases, just as aspirin came from willows, digitalin from foxgloves, and the common anti-cancer drug Vincristine from the Madagascar periwinkle.

Cayenne Ticks, as shown in a Globo News report on amblyomin-X

It´s not a rule of nature that something has to be beautiful to be useful. Few animals are uglier or more unpleasant than the Cayenne Tick, Amblyomma cajennense, which lives to suck blood from any animal it can find, including man. Not only that, but it can transmit disease, including Sao Paulo fever, or Rocky Mountain spotted fever. If you see one biting you, don´t just flick it away, you might leave the head still biting you, or at least cause the tick to regurgitate it's infected saliva into your wound (what you should do is use forceps to grasp it as close to your skin as possible, and gently pull straight back, then disinfect the wound).

So how is this tick a good thing? Well, researchers at the Butantan Institute in Sao Paulo have isolated a compound from that saliva called amblyomin-X. It´s not quite clear how, but amblyomin-X persuades cancer cells to self-destruct, whilst leaving healthy cells alone. Even better, it stops angiogenesis, which is now tumours get their own blood supply - so the tumour cannot grow, cannot spread around the body, and basically "starves".

 Harvesting tick saliva (Globo News)

Amblyomin-X works very well on rats, and next year should enter human trials. If these are successful it would be historic, because it would be the very first medicine developed from discovery to industrial production in Brazil.

Fire at Butantan

I wrote in an earlier blog about the Butantan Institute in Sao Paulo, which amongst other things had the largest collection of live and preserved poisonous animals in the world. Snakes, spiders and scorpions kept both for the production of anti-venom, and also for identification of animals found in the wild, and for research.

Unfortunately early on Saturday morning the collection building caught fire, and the entire collection of 80,000 preserved snakes, and about 450,000 spiders and scorpions was destroyed. Incredibly there was no sprinkler system, or even a fire alarm - even more surprising when you consider that the specimens were stored in ethanol!

Still, miraculously, the early hour meant that no one was hurt, and the live snakes required for anti-venom survived. Nonetheless Brazil has lost a unique resource that will be extremely hard to replace.

Butantan

“Poison of asps is under our lips”?
Why do you wrench them apart?
To learn how the venom makes and drips
And works its way to the heart?
It is unjust that when we have done
All that a serpent should,
You gather our poisons, one by one,
And thin them out to your good.

There are innumerable creatures in the Mata Atlantica, and more widely in Brazil, who exist to sting, bite or poison you. The answer lies in the Butantan Institute of Sao Paulo.

Butantan was founded in 1901 by the Brazilian scientist Vital Brazil - one of history's greatest examples of a name determining one's fate. Dr. Vital Brazil Mineiro da Campanha was a remarkable figure, working in Public Health so successfully that he was only 36 when appointed director of the new Butantan Institute for Serum Therapy. Vital's new Institute was set up near the city of Sao Paulo.

Well, actually not very near. Research into poisonous animals requires their culture and breeding, and the municipal authorities nervously placed their new institute in an unused swampy area far from the city centre. A description of his Institute 1927 was as follows;

There is, at the far end of one of the never-ending suburbs of San Paulo, a snake-farm where serums are prepared and dispensed against the bites of venomous serpents, which abound in these parts. Like most of the things that matter, it was one man's notion and work. Unluckily, the man himself was up or down coast at the time of our visit. But we found the "farm" sitting alone amid beautiful grounds in a faultless stretch of drive—a big, white, shuttered remote pile in dead heat among the crashing (colours hit here) green of its cut lawns and the raw bosses and clumps of flowers.

Vital's remit was to develop the new technique of antivenom for Brazil. This was the idea that serum derived from a poisoned animal could be used as a remedy for that poison in other animals. Although there is research into genetically engineering bacteria to produce antivenom proteins, the basic process hasn't changed much from those days......

We returned to the outside blaze, on our way back, and passed another silent range of white buildings, where are the horses and such, through whose systems the poisons are attenuated and controlled, so that folk may live longer who would otherwise have died horribly.
Roughly speaking the process begins with an infinitely small injection of poison into a carefully kept horse. He reacts, but lives (for the dose is well known now), and the injection is gradually increased till he can resist, proportionately, as much of the venom as opium-eaters could of laudanum. Then he is tapped for some pints of his blood, and of its serum, duly attenuated and sterilised, the anti-venom is made. When it is administered to a man in need, the two powers war together on the physical side, as one may see the powers of the spirit tearing the soul of a sinner "under conviction" before he finds salvation. Every muscle and nerve and blood corpuscule may be involved, as well as other powers that we know not of; but normally, after the throes and disintegrations, the body recovers and—since it is sister of the soul—throws off and puts behind it in a very little while all that nightmare of experiences in restored health. But, they say, the process is not a pleasant one to watch; and men are thinking and working all their lives to make it less vehement. Yet, after all, the only cure for venomous bites is the foot of man making hard paths from but to hut, field to field, and shrine to shrine, through the length and breadth of a land.

Anyway, Vital pursued the new field of anti-venoms with gusto, developing remedies not just for the numerous types of poisonous Brazilian snakes, but also the first for scorpions and spiders. He also pioneered the use of polyvalent anti-sera, ie. those effective against several different venoms. This is especially important when one considers how few victims can identify the snake they've just been bitten by.

Of course, the best serum is made from the same breed of snake as bit you. But people are often not accurate when they are bitten, so a 'general' serum is sent to the farmers. It cures—it cures surely—but it takes longer and it hurts a little more than the specialized serum.

Nowadays Butantan is a huge institution, responsible not just for snake and spider anti-venoms, but also vaccine production for rabies, tuberculosis and many other diseases. During the recent swine flu outbreak it was Butantan who were charged with developing Brazil's response and they are by far Latin Americas largest producers of vaccines, with 110 million doses produced in 2001 alone. Butantan's snake collection and museums are also open to the public, and this makes a very popular tourist attraction.

The quotations here have been borrowed (plundered) from the work of Rudyard Kipling. He visited Brazil in 1927 and was given a tour of Butantan. His writings, on this and other aspects of Brazil, can be found at
http://www.kipling.org.uk/braz_four.htm

Tarantulas - Creations of a Personal Devil

"Tarantula" is one of those words that "everybody knows", but is tricky to pin down scientifically. Yes, it means a big hairy spider, but there are more than one type of these, they have different behaviours, and some are (much!) more poisonous than others. Nowadays it generally refers to the family Theraphosidae, so when I say tarantula, I´m referring to them.

In Brazil there are, believe it or not, 170 different species of tarantula. They generally live in burrows and stay fairly close to the hole, hunting at night. They eat more or less anything they can kill, but they are themselves hunted, particularly by the huge Tarantula Hawk wasp, whose bite causes instant paralysis, but not death. The unfortunate spider is then dragged away to be used as a larder by wasp larvae.

Sometimes they do go walkabout. Males go looking for females, and it is said that they leave their holes when storms are expected, which does seem reasonable. Tarantulas can, I can testify, climb glass. This has the rather neat advantage that they can be photographed from below, which somehow makes them even more frightening.

Despite their fearsome appearance, and reported aggressiveness, tarantulas in the Americas are not so dangerous. The pain of an tarantula bite in the Americas is supposedly not particularly intense and indeed in Mexico the Tzeltel reportedly encourage tarantulas to bite tumours as a sort of chemotherapy.

In contrast, perhaps the only "attractive" characteristic of tarantulas is their furry appearance, but ironically, that is the only thing humans really have to fear. Don't stroke one! They are covered with special barbed hairs which they can flick off at a predator (or prey, or just someone they don't like) which can be incredibly irritating to the eyes and throat. Interestingly in Bahia powdered tarantula tea is recommended for asthma, which sounds like a guaranteed asthma attack - perhaps just the threat of it "cures" the poor patient until he is out of sight of the healer.

If you really must play with a tarantula, go here.......

http://www.onemotion.com/flash/spider/

By the way, the arachnophobic description in the title is from Rudyard Kipling. In 1927 he visited the world famous venom research institute at Butantan, Sao Paulo, and left a characteristically pithy description, but more of that another time.