It is my understanding that all monitors, not just the komodo variety, have so much bacteria in their mouths that a bite from them almost always makes the victim deathly ill. When I have encountered them (I often live in SE Asia), I try to give them a wide berth.
That is my understanding as well.
I lived in the Philippines when I was a kid, and they had monitor lizards there, and they could get up six or seven feet long, if I recall correctly. Not as big as Komodo Dragons, but that’s pretty big.
I had a friend whose father was a LCDR was involved in running the JEST (Jungle Environmental Survival Training) course they had in Subic Bay for pilot training up near NAS Cubi Point, and this kid got all kinds of cool knowledge and stuff from his dad.
One of the things he showed me how to do was make a trap for monitor lizards by building a small narrow box open on one end with the bait on the closed end (I forget what we baited it with) you anchor it to the ground with sticks, next to a small sapling or tree with a bendable low branch and tie a line to the branch and make a noose at the other end. Part way down, you make a little wooden thingamabob that you tie to the rope, bend the branch or sapling down, put the little wooden thing with a small lip into a hole you cut in the box, and arrange the open noose around the open end of the box.
When the lizard pokes it head through the open noose into the box to go for the bait, its snout knocks the little wooden trigger loose, freeing the sapling or branch which swoops upwards, tightening the noose around the neck of the lizard and capturing it.
I remember being somewhat dubious of this, but he said he had built them and they worked as advertised. He said the trap could be made with bamboo and a bolo (machete) which we both had strapped to our waists. (as a 12 year old kid, it seems so odd that we were allowed to walk around with machetes on our person, but they were a prized thing, like the Navy issue boondockers my dad got for me...my Bolo came from “Yard Boy” as they were called, who did mowing and yard maintenance for our family. He said he had it made out of old car leaf springs for me! He wrapped the handle tight with multicolored twine, which gave it a completely cool “native” look...:)
We came back a couple of times a day to that point in the jungle for a day or two and found nothing, but then we came down, and damned if there wasn’t a lizard dangling there by it’s neck. It was about four feet long and it’s back legs were just off the ground.
It wasn’t moving and I thought for sure the noose had strangled it, but as we approached it, the thing began thrashing wildly! He went around and grabbed onto its tail and pulled it straight out while I grabbed the rope and untied it from the sapling, then he took another piece of rope and tied it around the abdomen of the lizard just in front of its legs.
He told me to let go of the rope, and I expressed concern that the lizard might whip around and attack him, but he said something to the effect of “I’ve done this before-they only run away from you” so I let go, and sure enough, the lizard ran away, and he wrangled the thing back onto the road and walked up the street with the lizard at the end of the rope!
He kept it in a trash can at his house until his father ordered him to release it a day or two later!