Poison as Medicine

Poison as Medicine

The more we learn about how venoms cause their awful damage, the more we realize, medically speaking, how useful they can be.

By Christie Wilcox in Discover Magazine

“I moved to California to die.”

Ellie Lobel was 27 when she was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease. And she was not yet 45 when she decided to give up fighting for survival.

Caused by corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, which enter the body through the bite of a tick, Lyme disease is diagnosed in around 300,000 people every year in the United States. It kills almost none of these people, and is by and large curable – if caught in time. If doctors correctly identify the cause of the illness early on, antibiotics can wipe out the bacteria quickly before they spread through the heart, joints and nervous system.

But back in the spring of 1996, Ellie didn’t know to look for the characteristic bull’s-eye rash when she was bitten – she thought it was just a weird spider bite. Then came three months with flu-like symptoms and horrible pains that moved around the body. Ellie was a fit, active woman with three kids, but her body did not know how to handle this new invader. She was incapacitated. “It was all I could do to get my head up off the pillow,” Ellie remembers.

Her first doctor told her it was just a virus, and it would run its course. So did the next. As time wore on, Ellie went to doctor after doctor, each giving her a different diagnosis. Multiple sclerosis. Lupus. Rheumatoid arthritis. Fibromyalgia. None of them realized she was infected with Borrelia until more than a year after she contracted the disease – and by then, it was far too late. Lyme bacteria are exceptionally good at adapting, with some evidence that they may be capable of dodging both the immune system and the arsenal of antibiotics currently available. Borrelia are able to live all over the body, including the brain, leading to neurological symptoms. And even with antibiotic treatment, 10–20 percent of patients don’t get better right away. There are testimonies of symptoms persisting – sometimes even resurfacing decades after the initial infection – though the exact cause of such post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome is a topic of debate among Lyme scientists.

“I just kept doing this treatment and that treatment,” says Ellie. Her condition was constantly worsening. She describes being stuck in bed or a wheelchair, not being able to think clearly, feeling like she’d lost her short-term memory and not feeling “smart” anymore. Ellie kept fighting, with every antibiotic, every pharmaceutical, every holistic treatment she could find. “With some things I would get better for a little while, and then I would just relapse right back into this horrible Lyme nightmare. And with every relapse it got worse.”

After fifteen years, she gave up.

“Nothing was working any more, and nobody had any answers for me,” she says. “Doctors couldn’t help me. I was spending all this cash and was going broke, and when I got my last test results back and all my counts were just horrible, I knew right then and there that this was the end.”

“I had outlived so many other people already,” she says, having lost friends from Lyme support groups, including some who just couldn’t take the suffering any more. “I didn’t care if I was going to see my next birthday. It’s just enough. I was ready to call it a life and be done with it.”

So she packed up everything and moved to California to die. And she almost did.

Less than a week after moving, Ellie was attacked by a swarm of Africanized bees.

Lethal Swarm

Ellie was in California for three days before her attack. “I wanted to get some fresh air and feel the sun on my face and hear the birds sing. I knew that I was going to die in the next three months or four months. Just laying there in bed all crumpled up… It was kind of depressing.”

At this point, Ellie was struggling to stand on her own. She had a caregiver on hand to help her shuffle along the rural roads by her place in Wildomar, the place where she had chosen to die.

She was just standing near a broken wall and a tree when the first bee appeared, she remembers, “just hitting me in the head”. “All of a sudden – boom! – bees everywhere.”

Her caregiver ran. But Ellie couldn’t run – she couldn’t even walk. “They were in my hair, in my head, all I heard was this crazy buzzing in my ears. I thought: wow, this is it. I’m just going to die right here.”

Ellie, like 1–7 percent of the world’s population, is severely allergic to bees. When she was two, a sting put her into anaphylaxis, a severe reaction of the body’s immune system that can include swelling, nausea and narrowing of the airways. She nearly died. She stopped breathing and had to be revived by defibrillation. Her mother drilled a fear of bees into her to ensure she never ended up in the same dire situation again. So when the bees descended, Ellie was sure that this was the end, a few months earlier than expected.

Bees – and some other species in the order Hymenoptera, such as ants and wasps – are armed with a potent sting that many of us are all too aware of. This is their venom, and it’s a mixture of many compounds. Perhaps the most important is a tiny 26-amino-acid peptide called melittin, which constitutes more than half of the venom of honey bees and is found in a number of other bees and wasps. This little compound is responsible for the burning pain associated with bee stings. It tricks our bodies into thinking that they are quite literally on fire.

When we experience high temperatures, our cells release inflammatory compounds that activate a special kind of channel, TRPV1, in sensory neurons. This ultimately causes the neurons to send a signal to the brain that we’re burning. Melittin subversively makes TRPV1 channels open by activating other enzymes that act just like those inflammatory compounds.

Jellyfish and other creatures also possess TRPV1-activating compounds in their venoms. The endpoint is the same: intense, burning pain.

“I could feel the first five or ten or fifteen but after that... All you hear is this overwhelming buzzing, and you feel them hitting your head, hitting your face, hitting your neck,” says Ellie.

“I just went limp. I put my hands up and covered my face because I didn’t want them stinging me in the eyes… The next thing I know, the bees are gone.”

When the bees finally dissipated, her caregiver tried to take her to the hospital, but Ellie refused to go. “This is God’s way of putting me out of my misery even sooner,” she told him. “I’m just going to accept this.”

“I locked myself in my room and told him to come collect the body tomorrow.”

But Ellie didn’t die. Not that day, and not three to four months later.

“I just can’t believe that was three years ago, and I just can’t believe where I am now,” she tells me. “I had all my blood work done. Everything. We tested everything. I’m so healthy.”

She believes the bees, and their venom, saved her life.