The wacky world of HIV and gecko spit

tokay gecko (credit: afternoon)

The poor old Tokay lizard has yet another problem to deal with. It would appear that the latest crazy wonder drug is an enzyme from it’s saliva that is reputed to be able to cure HIV. Such magical properties has seen the value of a Tokay gecko in the Asian countries go so high that people are reputedly giving up jobs and heading to the jungles on gecko hunts.

New threat to the Tokay gecko.

This is a real concern for the Tokay gecko because while they are currently still widespread and common the shear scale of the hunting could very quickly cause numbers to crash. When you have the gecko hunters catching a thousand plus at a time then wild population will find it hard to replace the losses.

As with all good urban myths there a mixture of total fabrication and a big dose of rumour attached to the claims.

The craze has really taken off in the last 18 months or so where prices of the Tokay gecko in the Asian markets have increased by at least 50 times! In September 2009 a 200g Tokay gecko could be bought for about £40 in Malaysian markets the current price is said to be around £22,000. At those sort of prices it doesn’t take long for people to see a business opportunity. Take at look at some forums and you’ll soon see stories of people who are giving up their day job to look for the geckos in the forests.

Even commercial breeders are taking advantage of this new – and totally false – claim for the Tokay gecko. Why supply to a pet trade that retails the geckos for less than £20 each when you can concentrate on the medical trade and make £18,000 or more for each gecko.

Where’s the evidence for the cure of HIV?

There really is no evidence at all about the ability for the saliva of the Tokay gecko to cure aids or have any benefits at all. In traditional Chinese medicine eating gecko is thought to help with itchy skin - there’s no claim over the abilities of it to fight HIV.

As with all good urban myths there a mixture of total fabrication and a big dose of rumour attached to the claims. It appears that the claims first started to appear shortly after the drug exenatide was licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2005 as a treatment for type 2 diabetes. The drug is based on a protein found in the saliva of the gila monster (Heloderma suspectum), a venomous lizard of North America.

As any reptile keeper will tell you the Tokay gecko can deliver a pretty painful bite and they can hang onto their victim for quite some time before finally releasing them. Sometimes the only way to get a Tokay to release you is to submerge the lizard in water or it’s claimed that a drop of vinegar on the nose will get it to release you.

So there you go – take a painful poisonous lizard bite that treats diabetes add in a painful gecko bite and swirl it around with a good dose of an incurable disease like HIV and hey presto, you have a voodoo potion to treat something that modern science has been trying to cure for decades and failed. Personally I think you’ll be far better off taking the drop of vinegar than kissing a gecko for it’s saliva if you have HIV.

Evolving claims of the gecko cure myth.

As the claims for it’s saliva is being rubbished by scientists new claims are now emerging. It appears that it’s now no longer the enzymes in the saliva that cures HIV but enzymes in the gecko’s heart. It appears that stalking the Malaysian markets are secret buyers from multinational drugs companies buying up just the hearts of geckos with a perfect body mass index (BMI).

Let’s hope that these claims are laid to rest quickly before the wild Tokay gecko populations of the Asian forests suffer too much. As it is they are hunted down for the pet trade, hunted for use as sport in lizard fighting competitions and use in the international bush meat trade.