Article on Poisonous Animals
A Komodo dragon is the world’s heaviest lizard, weighing up to three hundred pounds. The Komodo dragon has six venom on each side of the head. A biologist named Bryan Fry at the University of Queensland in Australia, is studying how the Komodo dragon uses poison to benefit itself, because he trying to manipulate venom to help humans as well.
There are many other animals that are also poisonous. John Dumbacher, an ornithologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, has been studying the Hooded Pitohui. This bird is very poisonous, and contains high levels of batrachotoxin. In 2011, a biologist named Jonathan Kingdon, at the University of Oxford in England, discovered that the African crested rat can poison anything that the animal touches. They get their venom due to what they eat. The rat gets its poison by chewing up toxic tree bark and spreads its very-toxic saliva over its specialized hairs.
Scientists have been learning a lot from the animals because the researchers’ goal is to save human lives. Animal venoms is being used to develop a number of new drugs, including those that treat heart disease and chronic pain. The reason they use animal venom is because the toxins can’t tell harmful cells in the bodies to stop working and destroying the human body. So this is how the animal venom can save lives.
I feel that the research is really important to see the effects of animal venom on human diseases. There are over thousands of diseases that effect humans, that we don’t know cures for. So people are getting more and more harm for these incurable diseases every day. So researchers always have to look everywhere for cures, including in animal venom. You never know if the cure for AIDS or types of cancer may be found in toxins.
However that’s not a guarantee that animal venom will have any positive effects on humans. The article stated this was a multimillion research project. They are taking a high gamble, because there’s a high chance they may not find the animal venom useless. Also, the animal venom my do more bad than good. Venom is deadly, so researchers have to be careful that their venom doesn’t do any bad to the rest of the body, and due intensive research. In the end, scientist won’t be finding any cures anytime soon.
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