Ellie Lobel was ready to die. Then she was attacked by bees. Christie Wilcox hears
how venom can be a saviour.
Ellie Lobel was 27 when she was bitten by a tick and contracted
Lyme disease. And she was not yet 45 when she decided to give up
fighting for survival.
Caused by corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, which
enter the body through the bite of a tick, Lyme disease is diagnosed
in around 300,000 people every year in the United States. It kills
almost none of these people, and is by and large curable – if
caught in time. Antibiotics can wipe out the bacteria quickly before
they spread through the heart, joints and nervous system.
But back in the spring of 1996, Ellie didn’t know to look for the
characteristic bull’s-eye rash when she was bitten – she thought it
was just a weird spider bite. Then came three months with flu-like
symptoms and horrible pains that moved around the body. Ellie was
a fit, active woman with three kids, but her body did not know
how to handle this new invader. She was incapacitated. “It was all I
could do to get my head up off the pillow,” Ellie remembers.
Her first doctor told her it was just a virus, and it would run its
course. So did the next. As time wore on, Ellie went to doctor after
doctor, each giving her a different diagnosis. Multiple sclerosis. Lupus.
Rheumatoid arthritis. Fibromyalgia. None of them realised she was
infected with Borrelia until more than a year after she contracted
the disease – and by then, it was far too late.
“I just kept doing this treatment and that treatment,” says Ellie. Her
condition was constantly worsening. She describes being stuck in bed
or a wheelchair, not being able to think clearly, feeling like she’d
lost her short-term memory and not feeling “smart” anymore. “I
would get better for a little while, and then I would just relapse
right back into this horrible Lyme nightmare. And with every relapse
it got worse.”
After 15 years, she gave up. “Nothing was working any more, and
nobody had any answers for me,” she says. “I didn’t care if I was
going to see my next birthday. It’s just enough. I was ready to call it
a life and be done with it.”
So she packed up everything and moved to California to die. And
she almost did.
Less than a week after moving, Ellie was attacked by a swarm of
Africanised bees.
Swarm saviour
Ellie was in California for three days before her attack. “I wanted to
get some fresh air and feel the sun on my face and hear the birds
sing. I knew that I was going to die in the next three months or four
months. Just laying there in bed all crumpled up… It was kind of
depressing.”
At this point, Ellie was struggling to stand on her own. She had a
caregiver on hand to help her shuffle along the rural roads by her
place in Wildomar, the place where she had chosen to die.
She was just standing near a broken wall and a tree when the first
bee appeared, she remembers, “just hitting me in the head”. “All of a
sudden – boom! – bees everywhere.”
Her caregiver ran. But Ellie couldn’t run – she couldn’t even walk.
“They were in my hair, in my head, all I heard was this crazy
buzzing in my ears. I thought: wow, this is it. I’m just going to die
right here.”
Ellie, like 1–7% of the world’s population, is severely allergic to bees.
When she was two, a sting put her into anaphylaxis, a severe
reaction of the body’s immune system that can include swelling,
nausea and narrowing of the airways. She nearly died. She stopped
breathing and had to be revived by defibrillation. Her mother drilled
a fear of bees into her to ensure she never ended up in the same
dire situation again.
Strong sting
Bees – and some other species in the order Hymenoptera, such as ants
and wasps – are armed with a potent sting. This is their venom, and
it’s a mixture of many compounds. Perhaps the most important is a
tiny 26-amino-acid peptide called melittins, which is responsible for
the feeling of burning.
When we experience high temperatures, our cells release
inflammatory compounds that activate a special kind of channel,
TRPV1, in sensory neurons. This ultimately causes the neurons to send
a signal to the brain that we’re burning. Melittin subversively makes
TRPV1 channels open by activating other enzymes that act just like
those inflammatory compounds.
“I could feel the first five or 10 or 15 but after that... All you hear is
this overwhelming buzzing, and you feel them hitting your head,
hitting your face, hitting your neck,” says Ellie.
“I just went limp. I put my hands up and covered my face because I
didn’t want them stinging me in the eyes… The next thing I know,
the bees are gone.”
When the bees finally dissipated, her caregiver tried to take her to
the hospital, but Ellie refused to go. “This is God’s way of putting me
out of my misery even sooner,” she told him. “I’m just going to
accept this.
“I locked myself in my room and told him to come collect the body
tomorrow.”
But Ellie didn’t die. Not that day, and not three to four months later.
“I just can’t believe that was three years ago, and I just can’t believe
where I am now,” she tells me. “I had all my blood work done.
Everything. We tested everything. I’m so healthy.”
She believes the bees, and their venom, saved her life.
The idea that the same venom toxins that cause harm may also be
used to heal is not new. Bee venom has been used as a treatment in
East Asia for centuries. In Chinese traditional medicine, scorpion venom
is recognised as a powerful medicine, used to treat everything from
eczema to epilepsy. Mithradates VI of Pontus, a formidable enemy of
Rome (and also an infamous toxinologist), was said to have been
saved from a potentially fatal wound on the battlefield by using
steppe viper venom to stop the bleeding.
“Over millions of years, these little chemical engineers have developed
a diversity of molecules that target different parts of our nervous
system,” says Ken Winkel, Director of the Australian Venom Research
Unit at the University of Melbourne. “This idea of applying these
potent nerve toxins to somehow interrupt a nervous disease has been
there for a long time. But we haven’t known enough to safely and
effectively do that.”



www.bbc.com/future/story/20150327-how-a-bee-sting-saved-my-life