You’ve got to give it to the quacks. They can take a bland morsel and cook up an appetizing meal. They can also cook up a great story to go along with it. The more esoteric the morsel, the more exotic the final menu. And you sure don’t get much more esoteric than crocodile blood. Well, not exactly crocodile blood, but a substance said to be found in it. That supposedly was the secret behind a product unabashedly named “The Antidote.” Antidote to what? To virtually everything. The Antidote was claimed to be effective against bacteria and viruses as well as against AIDS, SARS and of course cancer. Where do these charlatans 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 clamp their jaws on. Cannibalism is fine by them. But why were these wounds not getting infected, Fullerton Smith wondered? So 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 frogs as well as in the saliva of Komodo dragons. 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 during the digestion process, they just want some effect in the scientific literature that they can point at.
When they are challenged on such matters the marketers 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 was in The Antidote, but it surely was not crocodillin. This peptide is extremely difficult to isolate and requires a lot of crocodile blood. It is very doubtful that the Antidote people trudged around the swamps of Australia trying to poke needles into crocodiles capable of biting large chunks out of their bodies. Instead, they concentrated on taking large bites out of people desperate enough to plunk down lots of money for a totally useless product. Finally the FDA clamped down and warned the Antidote marketers that at least in the U.S. they can’t claim that their product can fight all known human viruses and bacteria and that it is effective against cancer, AIDS and SARS.
But you can’t keep a marketer down. If one of your products gets into trouble, just change the name and boost the nonsense! The Antidote has now been reincarnated as “Shacro,” with the great white shark joining the crocodile in the feeding frenzy for profits. The advertising implies that the great white possesses antimicrobial peptides like the crocodile, but there is no mention that Shacro contains any shark product. In fact it doesn’t even contain any crocodile product. Its “active ingredient” is a synthetic peptide that the company, now modestly called “The Secret of Survival,” implies, but does not say is identical to the antibiotic peptides found in crocs. Shacro’s claims are just as outrageous as The Antidote’s ever were and hopefully the FDA will go on another crocodile hunt. As you can imagine, all of this horrifies Dr. Diamond, whose serious research has been usurped by the charlatans.