An eight-year-old Indian boy miraculously survived by biting a cobra wrapped around his arm and sinking its teeth into his skin. The boy then kills the cobra by biting it again.
On Monday, a snake attacked a young kid named Deepak in the isolated village of Pandarpadh in India’s central Chhattisgarh area.
The cobra caught hold of him as he played outside his family’s house and wrapped its body around his arm before rearing back and biting down to inject its lethal poison.
Deepak shook his arm violently while fighting through the pain, but he could not get the reptile to move. At that time, he decided to treat the attacker badly and ruthlessly bit into its body, killing the reptile.
“The snake bit me when it circled my hand. According to Deepak, “I was in immense pain.”
I bit the reptile twice since I couldn’t get rid of it by shaking it. Everything happened so quickly, he claimed.
According to research released this week, over 85% of the recorded snakebite deaths in 2019 occurred in India, where snakebites are incredibly common.
Deepak’s parents hurried him to a local hospital, where he was put under monitoring to make sure he would make a full recovery out of fear for their son’s life following the bite.
Doctors who examined his wound found that he had been bitten “dry,” meaning the cobra had not released any venom.
The dry bite, which occurs when a dangerous snake bite without releasing any venom, allowed Deepak to recover quickly and without any symptoms, a snake specialist told The New Indian Express.
Adult snakes can fully control the release of venom from their glands, which is why they frequently deliver dry bites.
When battling off deadly predators or killing their prey, snakes employ venom. Attempts by snakes to warn or frighten away animals rather than to kill them frequently result in dry bites.
There are more than 200 species of snakes that live in the Jashpur district, where Deepak engaged the cobra in a battle.
According to a recent study, 51,000 of the expected 63,000 deaths from snakebites in 2019 occurred in India.
The World Health Organization’s target of reducing the number of deaths from snakebites by 2030, according to researchers from James Cook University in Queensland, is not likely to be achieved.
One of the primary causes of the high mortality toll, they added, was insufficient availability of antivenom in impoverished rural communities.
The study’s principal investigator, Professor Richard Franklin, stated: “Interventions to ensure more timely antivenom administration need to be combined with preventive initiatives including greater education and strengthened health systems in remote regions.
Greater investment in developing and scaling up these treatments should be prioritized to meet WHO’s snakebite envenoming and neglected tropical disease goals since it would save thousands of lives if timely access to antivenom were made available throughout rural areas of the world.
Researchers gathered autopsy and vital registration data from the Global Burden of Disease databases for the study, which was published last month in Nature Communications.
The percentage of poisonous animal deaths at the hands of snakes by region, age, s*ex, and the year was modelled using this information.
The findings showed that the bulk of deaths from snake venom happened in South Asia, which includes Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh and extends from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka.
Four snakebite deaths per 100,000 persons were estimated to occur, especially in India, which is significantly higher than the global average of 0.8.
Nigeria had the most fatalities (1,460) in the sub-Saharan African area, which came in second.
If antivenom is not given within six hours of a venomous snakebite, according to Professor Franklin, the likelihood of mortality increases.
Four species—the krait, Russell’s viper, saw-scaled viper, and Indian cobra—represent 90% of all snakebite cases in India.
All of these species have antivenom, but Professor Franklin noted that saving lives from snakebites depends on more than simply the availability of antivenom. It also depends on the ability of the health system to treat victims who suffer from secondary problems such as neuro-toxic respiratory failure or acute kidney injury needing dialysis.
Despite the fact that 63,000 deaths are still a large figure, this represents a 36% drop from 1990.
However, the researchers project that, as a result of population growth, the mortality toll will surpass 68,000 in 2050.
According to the study’s authors, mortality will continue to drop but not fast enough to achieve WHO goals.
To better target treatments, enhance burden estimation, and track success, it is important to emphasize improved data gathering.
Have you or someone you know got bitten by a snake? How did it happen? Please let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to spread the news so that we can hear from more people.
