Biologist Bryan Fry extracts venom from a king cobra—a process known as “milking.”have “well-designed air-handling systems” and that workers don appropriate personal protective equipment, or PPE, in order to reduce the risk of developing an allergy. However, interviews with researchers and experts suggest that there may be little awareness of—or adherence to—guidelines like these.
While anecdotes of allergic scientists abound, research into the issue is scant. The best documented are allergies to rodents, which are ubiquitous in biomedical research. But some scientists report allergies that are almost completely unstudied, potentially because relatively few people—at least in wealthy nations in which many allergy studies are conducted—regularly come into contact with the organisms that cause them.
Doctoral student Danielle de Carle used to collect and feed leeches with her own blood—until she became allergic. She now uses sausage casings filled with pig blood to nourish them.Nia Walker, a Ph.D. student in biology at Stanford University, has also begun reacting to her research organism. Walker studies how genetics influence coral bleaching resistance and recovery.
that their allergies are annoying but manageable. But sometimes, the allergies force researchers to make major changes. Fry, the biologist who became allergic to snake venom, also says his allergy has shaped his career. The venoms of different snake species share similar components, Fry says, so someone who is allergic to one type of snake is likely allergic to many types. Because of this allergy, Fry also has to be extremely careful even around venomous snakes that are usually not dangerous to humans.
But actually applying those preventative measures can be challenging, says Johanna Feary, who studies occupational lung disease as a senior clinical research fellow at Imperial College London.Courtesy of Bryan Fryin the UK that performed research on mice. They found that facilities that used individually ventilated cages, instead of open cages, had dramatically lower airborne allergen levels. But even that was not sufficient to prevent technicians from becoming sensitized to mouse allergens.
Fry says there is more awareness of snake venom allergy than there was when he started formally studying snakes in the late 1990s. But, he adds, “it’s still not as well-known as it should be.” Researchers in the field, he wrote in a follow-up email, can be reticent to talk about venom allergies. But, he says, “I’m quite candid about it because, you know, this is life-saving information.”