Tim Friede with a water cobra

Centivax

I know what it feels like to almost die from a snake bite. You can’t move. You can’t breathe. Your diaphragm’s frozen. But you can hear everything. So when I was in the ICU, I could hear the doctors talking about me. “Why did he do it? Was it a suicide attempt?” And I’m like: no, it wasn’t. I just screwed up.

I began injecting myself with snake venom in 2001, in an effort to develop a treatment. If you look at the numbers, 5 million people are bitten every year. There are 138,000 deaths every year and 400,000-plus amputations and other complications . Those are pretty big numbers.

There are organisations that want to help, like the Strike Out Snakebite global initiative, which is looking to raise awareness of the impact of snake-bite envenoming. And there is snake antivenom, first invented 125 years ago by Albert Calmette . But these haven’t changed much in that time, and they aren’t perfect.…