Pretty much every person on Earth lives within range of an area inhabited by snakes, researchers reported in 2018 in a study published in the journal The Lancet.
Snakes make their homes in deserts, mountains, river deltas, grasslands, swamps and forests, as well as saltwater and freshwater habitats. After natural disasters, such as floods or wildfires, snakes often move into populated areas that they previously avoided — they may even seek shelter in houses
Each year, up to five million people worldwide are estimated to be bitten by snakes. Out of those, around 100,000 die and 400,000 are left disabled or disfigured by their injuries.
When bit by a snake, one should look for symptoms such as redness, swelling, blistering, warmth and then signs of nausea, vomiting, muscle pain and low blood pressure. If you get any of these, then the chances are that you have been bitten by a venomous snake. And they can be Grade A killers!
There are two main ways snakes make us suffer – by attacking the circulatory system and/or the nervous system:
Haemotoxic venom goes for the bloodstream. It can trigger lots of tiny blood clots and then when the venom punches holes in blood vessels causing them to leak, there is nothing left to stem the flow and the patient bleeds to death.
Neurotoxic venom tends to act more quickly, attacking the nervous system and stopping nerve signals getting through to the muscles. This means paralysis, starting at the head, moving down the body until, if untreated, the diaphragm is paralyzed and the patient can’t breathe. A classic sign of this is ptosis, when people can’t keep their eyes open.
A snakebite hurts! For most snakes, there’s the pain felt from the initial bite, as the fangs sink into the skin, and then the pain created by the venom as it starts to work – causing inflammation, clotting the blood, causing skin cells to self-destruct.
Despite what movie and TV Westerns would have you believe, victims of snakebite shouldn’t try to suck out the venom from the bite site or release it by cutting themselves. On the contrary, they should not get distracted with home remedies, but rather try to make their way to the hospital as quickly as possible.
The cure for a snakebite is antivenom. Antivenom is made by collecting venom from the relevant animal and injecting small amounts of it into a domestic animal. The antibodies that form are then collected from the domestic animal’s blood and purified.
Considering that snakes usually have completely different venoms (even those of the same species), before the antivenom is given one must know what kind of snake bit them. Most people who get bitten by a snake aren’t exactly sure what kind of snake it is that bit them and so having an anti-venom that works against a variety of different species is really important.
However, such antivenom does not exist yet, and its absence will translate into countless deaths.
