You’ve got to give it to the quacks. They are often clever people. And very adept at making mountains out of molehills. One of the latest miracles out there is, believe it or not, crocodile blood. Well, not exactly crocodile blood, but a substance supposedly isolated from it, which they have named “The Antidote.”
Antidote for what? They certainly are not shy about the claims they make. The Antidote works against bacteria and viruses as well as against AIDS, SARS and of course cancer. Where do they get such ideas? Pull ’em out of a hat? No, in this case out of a BBC documentary. Jill Fullerton Smith, a producer with the BBC, was filming a documentary on crocodiles in Australia. She noticed that many of the crocodiles had horrific injuries caused by biting each other. Crocs apparently are not particular about what they bite into. Cannibalism is fine by them. But why were these wounds not getting infected, Fullerton Smith wondered? That’s when she looked around for someone who had expertise in this area and contacted Dr. Gill Diamond at the New Jersey College of Dentistry. Diamond had already done some work on antibiotic peptides in the skin of winter flounder and of frogs and the saliva of Komodo dragons. So he certainly seemed to be the man for the job when it came to crocodile bites. Dr. Diamond began to investigate the blood of the crocodiles and did find some peptides, basically short chains of amino acids, that had antibiotic activity in Petri dishes.
One in particular, termed crocodillin, proved to be interesting. But there is absolutely no evidence that this can be used as a drug. But that of course does not bother the quacks. They don’t care that peptides are broken down in the digestion process, they just want some effect in the scientific literature they can point at. When they are challenged on such matters they hide behind the usual verbal shield: the information is being stifled by the drug companies because if this product were on the shelf next to their major brands, they would lose billions every day.
I don’t know what actually is in The Antidote, but it surely is not crocodillin. This peptide is extremely difficult to isolate and requires a lot of crocodile blood. It is very doubtful that these hucksters are trudging around the swamps of Australia trying to poke needles into crocodiles capable of biting large chunks out of their bodies. Instead, they concentrate on taking large bites out of people desperate enough to plunk down lots of money for a totally useless product. Finally the FDA has gotten into the game and has warned to operators of the website to stop claiming that The Antidote can fight all known human viruses and bacteria and is effective against cancer, AIDS and SARS. Unfortunately such warnings do not have much of an effect. Biological Miracle, the company that markets this stuff still features the claims on its website. As you can imagine, this horrifies Dr. Diamond, whose serious research has been usurped by the charlatans.
