From the issue dated October 11, 1996
NOTES FROM ACADEME
An Expert on Venoms Uses All of Australia as His Laboratory
By Peter Monaghan
Melbourne, Australia -- Struan Sutherland could easily scare the daylights out of you. Accompany him on his morning walks on the beach near his home and he could invite you to stick your hand into a rock pool, then tell you that it probably houses a small, peacock-blue-and-ochre octopus that can paralyze humans within 10 minutes and kill them in a few more.
"You can find them every five meters or so," he'd tell you. In fact, he'd add, the common blue-ringed octopus lives all along the Australian coastline."It has enough venom to paralyze 10 men," he says.
He would know. Director of the Australian Venom Research Unit at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Sutherland is the leading authority on venomous creatures in a land with an unrivaled menagerie of them. Talk to him, or read his books, and Australia will quickly stop resembling the version in tourism brochures, a place teeming with cuddly koalas, bounding kangaroos, and captivating platypuses. (Mind you, even a provoked platypus injects an excruciating toxin from spurs on its hind legs.)
Want to locate a dangerous animal? Dr. Sutherland suggests you try any rocky outcrop on farmland or in the endless scrub known as the bush. The rocks provide snakes with fine basking and leisurely dining on small mammals and reptiles. Probably a hardy eucalyptus -- a"gum tree" -- will shade the spot. In it may perch a kookaburra -- a cackling kingfisher wont to snack on serpents.
Most tourists, of course, head for the Great Barrier Reef. "Particularly up there, you don't pick up things," Dr. Sutherland warns."One out of every 10 living things there can cause you injury." Venomous jellyfish. Cone shells. Fish as ugly as they are toxic.
You wouldn't even have to leave the city to die of a bite or sting. Dr. Sutherland's beach, for example, is in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, the continent's second-largest city, with 2.5 million inhabitants. Skyscrapers loom three miles to the north. Tankers loll offshore. By the paved trail where he strolls, mums chat on benches as their babies gurgle in prams. Kids clamber on a jungle gym modeled on a sunken sloop. Clearly, the blue-ringed octopus doesn't perturb them. Nor should it, Dr. Sutherland says."It doesn't hop out of the water and run up an bite people on the beach. It only bites when it's picked up. Or squashed."
When it comes to snakes, too, inner cities are fairly safe. But not all suburbs. Nor farmland, scrub, or rain forests. All are haunts of Australia's 100 species of snake, of which 21 can readily kill humans. These are among the world's 24 most-venomous snakes. (Of species found in the United States, the most dangerous, the Eastern diamondback rattlesnake, ranks only 25th.)
"Australia's got the most venomous wildlife in the world," Dr. Sutherland says with apparent pride."In fact, in every category -- except perhaps scorpions -- we win hands down."
Fortunately, Australians can look to researchers like him not just for information on the perils of venom, but for antidotes, too. Among Dr. Sutherland's achievements has been his development, in the 1970s, of an antivenin for the funnel-web spider, whose bite, if untreated, is usually fatal. Most common around Sydney, the hairy arachnids pop up near damp, sheltered, back-yard swimming pools and barbecues.
Finding the antivenin took 18 years and earned for the spider Dr. Sutherland's undying admiration:"It's the most venomous spider in the world. And its venom is unique. It kills humans and monkeys, but not domestic animals. It has a unique predilection for primate tissue."
He was working in an immunology lab in the 1960s, after a stint in the navy, when he came across a report of a boy who had put his foot in his slipper, was bitten by a funnel-web, and died within an hour."I thought, These are modern times. This shouldn't happen." He set to work to prevent it.
Since then, medical research has greatly lowered the number of deaths from spider and snake bites, and medical workers will tell you that Dr. Sutherland deserves more credit for that than anyone else."He's the top, as far as I'm concerned," says Keith Rodrigues, manager of the Gosford Reptile Park, north of Sydney, which provides researchers with venom milked from snakes and spiders. (The venom is then injected into Percheron horses, which develop antibodies that can be extracted from blood samples to produce antivenin.)
"He's an amazing man," says Storry Walton, an officer of the Royal Australian Flying Doctor Service, whose members respond to emergencies in remote bush or farmland."He's the author of one of our handbooks, which is used throughout the bush. You'll find it in small mining camps in the hands of first-aid officers or mining engineers. You'll find it on the verandas of many outback homes, and in the glove boxes of commercial travelers in remote parts, and in the hands of lighthouse keepers."
Dr. Sutherland does not deny that he and others have made great strides."It's fair to say -- stop me if I'm pontificating -- that the management of snakebite in Australia is the best in the world," he says."That had to be."
What makes it so good?
Improved first-aid techniques, for one thing. Cutting and sucking bite sites now is"an absolute no-no." Applying a tourniquet also is ill-advised, because it becomes extremely painful. Most outmoded is amputation -- as well as most unfortunate, when, as is generally the case, the snake has not successfully injected venom with its bite.
Instead, one should use a highly effective method developed by Dr. Sutherland and some colleagues: Wrap tightly and splint the bitten limb. That keeps the venom near the bite site for up to 12 hours, allowing lucky victims to dodge such reactions as wicked headaches, vomiting of blood and bile, and a nervous-system failure that signals the lungs to shut down.
The researchers have also developed venom-detection kits, allowing hospitals to quickly determine what type of snake bit the victim."That tells us which antivenin to use," Dr. Sutherland says."No other country has them."
His lab gets thousands of phone inquiries each year on venom, from medical workers, chemists, researchers, and veterinarians. He also often ventures into the field; among his current quests is an explanation for necrotizing arachnidism, a bizarre, leprosy-like reaction to spider bites that often does require amputation of the affected limb."It's a very difficult problem to sort out," he says."There are strange technical problems." Thousands of Australians suffer from it. The suspect is the white-tailed spider, found in almost every Australian home at certain times of the year.
Dr. Sutherland's determination to understand venomous animals is registered in a rise in intonation as he remarks:"The older I get, the more wonerment I feel about them."
Does his own knowledge fill him with apprehension?"Most venomous creatures get out of the way," he says. So he bushwalks often, without fear, he says, even though"I'm basically a coward at heart. I know what some of these creatures can do."
Avoidance is the best approach, he tells the many teachers and tour guides who ask him for advice before they take groups into the bush."For 30 years I've been saying, 'Line your group up. Tell them: If they see a snake, leave it alone.'"
And if the snake doesn't reciprocate such forbearance? Stand quite still. Let it pass (over your foot, if it likes). Then run like blazes. Any snake's top speed is only seven miles per hour.
Copyright © 1996 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
