Quote Originally Posted by Dizaster View Post
If you get bitten by a poisonous snake and get treated, then bitten say, a second time. Do you begin to build up a tolerance or immunity to the snake bite? Like if you handled snakes a lot and were bitten 30 or 40 plus times, could you begin to get immune to the bites?
Not to be too technical about it, but snakes that have venom aren't "poisonous". a poison is something that you can ingest; i.e. bug spray, clorox, stuff under your sink that you clean with, etc., and if you swallow it it will make you sick or kill you. Venom can be swallowed and as long as you don't have a tear in you throat or stomach, it will just pass through your body. Venom has to enter the bloodstream to be effective. So to be geeky about it, they are 2 different things.

With that little gay rant over with; to answer your question about building immunity, there are a few people that inject themselves with small, somewhat diluted amounts of venom to build immunity. Jury is still out to whether it's effective. Look up a guy named Bill Haast. Still working with venomous snakes in Miami and is almost 100 years old. Been injecting himself with different venoms for years and swears it has added to his age. Who knows. I'm not doing it. That is how antivenin is made though. They take the venom from a snake, inject it into a horse, and the horse will build antibodies to it in a few days, then they draw the blood and do some lab stuff on it and voila', you have antivenin for snakebites.

Bill Haast - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia