Global Snake Bite Initiative

Interview with David Warrell (Professor Emeritus of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases, University of Oxford):

"Snake bite attacks are particularly vulnerable to impoverished group of people, these are the rural dwellers in tropical developing countries, farmers, pasteurists, herders, and their children. 40% of all snakebite victims are children less than the age of about 12 to 14.

They are amongst the most impoverished people in the world. They include the indigenous tribal people, for example, in areas like Yamasin parts of East Africa. As they have no political profile, their problems tend to be unknown, neglected, and even when understood, they’ve been forgotten and abandoned.

And that is the special argument for asking for attention and sympathy for problems of snake bite, so it is a neglected problem of rural people and in the tropical developing countries."

Cited from Confronting the Neglected Problem of Snake Bite Envenoming: The Need for a Global Partnership"
José María Gutiérrez*, R. David G. Theakston, David A. Warrell

The Global Burden of Snake Bite Envenoming:

In the tropical developing countries where snake bites occur most commonly, there are few reliable incidence data. One serious attempt to assess global snake bite mortality was the survey undertaken by Swaroop and Grabb in 1954, which was based largely on hospital admissions.

Subsequent work has revealed gross underreporting of deaths in this study—for example, in Nigeria and Thailand. One reason is that records of patients treated by traditional methods are missing from offi cial databased statistics, and deaths reported at the hamlet or district level may not be sent on to ministry headquarters.

Accepting these limitations, the fragmentary evidence available suggests that several million bites and envenomings occur worldwide each year, with tens of thousands of deaths.