SLITHERING DANGER IN AFRICA

The snake struck 11-year-old Beatrice Ndanu Munyoki as she sat on a small stone, which lay atop a larger one, watching the family's eight goats.

- Apoorva Mandavilli

She was idly running her fingers through the dirt when she saw a red head dart from between the stones and felt a sharp sting on her right index finger.

Never a crier, she ran to her father David Mutunga, who was building a fence. He cut the cloth belt on her dress into strips with a machete, tied her arm in three places and rushed her to a hospital 30 minutes away on a motorcycle taxi.

As the day stretched on, her finger grew darker, but the hospital in Mwingi, a small town in Kenya, had no antidote for that kind of venom. Finally, that evening in November 2023, she was taken by ambulance to another hospital and injected with antivenom.

When the finger blistered, swelled and turned black despite a second dose the next day, "I understood that they will now remove that part," said Mr Mutunga with tears in his eyes. Beatrice's finger was amputated.

In Kenya, India, Brazil and dozens of other countries, snakes vie for the same land, water and sometimes food as people, with devastating consequences. Deforestation, human sprawl and climate change are exacerbating the problem.

According to official estimates, about five million people are bitten by snakes each year. About 120,000 die, and some 400,000 lose limbs to amputation.

The real toll is almost certainly much higher. Estimates are generally based on hospital records, but most snakebites occur in rural areas, far from dispensaries that stock antivenom and among people too poor to afford treatment.

"We don't actually know the burden of snakebite for most countries of the world," said snake researcher Nicholas Casewell from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

Scientists are now trying to better quantify the problem. In nearly every country studied, the true toll of snakebites has been found to be much higher than the numbers registered in hospital records.

The problem was mostly ignored until recently.