Watch the painful moment 60 Minutes reporter Tom Steinfort is bitten by a ‘hit man’
- Presenter bit on hand during painful experiment
- Assan insect venom is used as an insecticide
A 60 Minutes reporter continued to flutter and jerk in extreme agony after being deliberately bitten on the hand by an assassin.
Host Tom Steinfort took up the challenge as part of an interview with “poison aficionado” Dr. Sam Robinson, who studies insect bites as part of drug discovery research.
Footage from the excruciating incident shows Steinfort hopping around and flapping his arms after being stabbed in the hand.
“Sometimes it’s like little twinges of pain — it started there and I feel it widening in my arm,” he says before yelling again.
60 Minutes reporter Tom Steinfort was bitten by a hitman known to be ‘extremely painful’
A bite from an assassin is extremely painful, because the same saliva secretion is injected through the skin with which they kill their prey.
Symptoms of a bite include an intense burning sensation followed by a lump at the site of the bite that lasts for several days.
Dr. Robinson is part of a team at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience trying to convert the assassin’s venom into a powerful insecticide free of harmful chemicals.
The team recently proved for the first time that some of the world’s most painful ant stings affect nerves, such as snake and scorpion venom.
‘We want to understand pain at the molecular level and toxins are fantastic tools to do this,’ said Dr Robinson.
Dr. Sam Robinson (right), who oversaw the deliberate bite, is studying insect venom in hopes of producing drugs to relieve pain or reduce the side effects of grueling treatments such as chemotherapy
Dr. Robinson compared the bite of a bullet ant (pictured) to “walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail embedded in your heel”
Dr. Robinson administered hundreds of self-inflicted insect bites to study the effects of various venoms.
He posts a photo of each insect and ranks the pain of their bite next to a pithy description of the feeling, often taken from Justin Schmidt’s The Sting of the Wild.
“Pure, intense, brilliant pain,” accompanies the description of a bullet ant’s bite.
“Like walking on flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”
Dr. Robinson studies the toxins and poisons and their effects in hopes of producing drugs to relieve pain or reduce the side effects of grueling treatments such as chemotherapy.
“At the moment, medicine doesn’t have the resources to deal with it (pain),” Dr. Robisnon at 60 Minutes.
“We are extremely dependent on opioids, things like morphine and codeine. But they have huge problems, including abuse.’
The program also heard about a professor who discovered a new molecule in the funnel web spider that could revolutionize the treatment of stokes or heart attacks.