Is crocodile blood the magic bullet that will take out AIDS? That is what medical researchers in Australia are cautiously suggesting after laboratory tests demonstrated that crocodile blood kills HIV — as well as a whole deadly menagerie of penicillin-resistant germs, viruses and bacteria — according to reports from Reuters and the BBC News.

"The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes," explained Adam Britton, one of the Australian researchers. "It’s like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger."

Certainly, if the blood of the crocodile can take out that miserable, maddeningly adaptable retrovirus which has been cutting down our friends and lovers since 1984, gay men may want to revive the cult of Sobek, the the crocodile god of the Nile (above), shown holding the ankh, symbol of life indestructible.

How to explain the potency of crocodile blood? "These animals are very territorial and when they fight it gets very ugly," an American scientist, Mark Merchant, who has been working on the project for the last three years, told the BBC. "And, despite the fact that [the crocodiles] live in an environment that harbor potentially a lot of pathogenic microbes, these horrible wounds seem to heal up very rapidly and almost always without infection…

"But this in itself has really no clinical utility," Merchant was quick to add, reminding listeners of some basic science. "I can’t isolate [antibodies] from alligators and inject them into your veins because your body would recognize that it was not human."

For this reason, Britton and Merchant spent early August trekking through Australia’s swampy Northern Territory, capturing the crocs, strapping their powerful jaws shut (a crocodile can remove a limb, severing the bone, with one clean chump) and extracting blood from a large vein behind the head. The scientists hope to collect enough crocodile blood to isolate the powerful antibodies and eventually develop an antibiotic for use by humans.

"We may be able to have antibiotics that you take orally … antibiotics that you could run topically on wounds," said Merchant. Even if it turns out that the crocodile’s immune system is too powerful for humans, the antibodies in the croc’s white cells could still be synthesized for human consumption.

Yeah science!

Yeah the great god Sobek, Patron of the Army, Curer of Ills