Kaleidoscope 万花筒 : 2018

How spiders could help us using their venom

--by Guo Cheng Guang（12 yrs）

Although many people are afraid of spiders, there are many people fascinated about spiders. Now, what is so fascinating about them? Aren’t they just creatures that creep around scaring you? Aren’t they just going to bite you, injure you and may kill you? What’s so nice about them? Actually, spiders, although dangerous, are very useful and important. For instance, some species could help keep down the levels of a type of insect. Just if a spider does not feel that we are going to harm them, they would not bite us.

These spiders, they produce a chemical compound, for different types, they produce different types and amounts. The overall name for the chemical compound is venom. The venom from these spiders paralyzes and kills prey so the spider would have food to eat. If you get bitten by one, you are really unlucky as spiders don’t really harm humans, but it is just a form of protection for itself, side effects of spider venom could be: sharp pain, disability, heart attack and even death. The venom could be so powerful that the heart might just stop, blood turn into jelly and your flesh just gets eaten up like being eaten by acids. Some lizards help with Type 2 Diabetes, sea snails used for anaesthetics and spider venom could do just the same. There are many, many different compounds, at a close estimation, scientists have only discovered 0.01% of all these compounds. All these are through a very dangerous process, people still take the dare to do it just to save more people’s lives from nasty infections, viruses, bacteria and parasites. A person who does research with spiders needs at least hundreds of them and could catch from 2 hundreds to 4 hundreds of spiders per hour. To get one liter of venom, the person needs at least a hundred spiders. They will make the spiders bite something then extract the venom from there, and change spider. Each spider must be put individually as when put together, they may fight each other to death and would be a great problem. Although we are studying about these spiders, but we have no means to kill them. The venom could then be diluted with water then put to test with different infections, viruses and others.

Around 1700 people die every day due to infections but research have shown that the venom can kill various types of infections. So, spider venom may be the new ‘weapon’ against virus, bacteria and infections that are rapidly evolving and changing, to save these people from death.

In fact, in the last five years, there were only about two new types of antibiotics per year and that progress is too slow against the chopping and changing infections and viruses, especially cancer. Even diluted venom could kill a whole bunch of bacteria or virus and that makes spider venom the new ‘antibiotics’ for humans against diseases and infections.

作者：郭承光（12岁）

Kaleidoscope 万花筒

Sunday, November 25, 2018

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How spiders could help us using their venom

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