Archives

Sri Lanka milks venomous snakes to save lives

COLOMBO, Tuesday (Reuters) An olive diamond-patterned viper that can kill with just one nip may be frightening to some but is just another day at the office for Amal Wijesekara.

The snake, native to Sri Lanka, is one of about 20 the handler "milks" every week to develop anti-venom in a country with one of the deadliest snake-bite rates in the world.

The procedure starts with Wijesekara pulling the viper out of its glass cage and gingerly prying open a mouth flanked by sharp fangs tipped with poison.

As the bewildered snake contorts and makes hissing sounds like compressed helium being released into a balloon, Wijesekara forces droplets of venom into a petri dish.

He repeats the process on other legless reptiles at the Snake Venom Research Laboratory and Herpetarium to collect enough deadly serum to make the anti-venom that the island -- where tens of thousands suffered bites last year -- now imports from India.

"I've never been bitten before," he told Reuters in English tinged with the muted consonants of his native Sinhala.

"I hope this will help save lives one day."

Snake bites are a way of life in Sri Lanka, especially for poor farmers who sleep on the ground and tend rice paddies where snakes gather to ambush rats attracted by the fields.

Wijesekara said he caught a poisonous viper last week near a restaurant in the capital Colombo that was waiting in the shadows of a garbage bin for a rat to scuttle by.

The Guinness Book of World Records gave the lush tropical isle of 19 million people the dubious honour in 1998 of having the highest number of snake bite deaths, placing the figure at about 800 people.

POISONOUS LAND, SEA SNAKES

An ecologial hothouse of flora and fauna, Sri Lanka has about 85 species of land snakes of which five are poisonous: the cobra, Russell's viper, Indian krait, common krait and saw-scaled viper.

An extremely dangerous species called the yellow-bellied sea snake has a flat tail for swimming and lurks around the island's coastline. It is equipped to inject more venom than land snakes because sea water tends to wash away secretions.

Jungle giant Brazil, by comparison, with a huge land mass about 130 times bigger than the tiny island, has only 20 species of poisonous snakes.

Herpetologist Ariaranee Ariaratnam, a doctor supervising the Sri Lankan centre, told Reuters that 37,000 people were bitten by snakes last year and 200 died, but the data was incomplete because only one-fifth of all hospitals reported figures.

And unlike fellow tropical countries Australia, India and Thailand, Sri Lanka doesn't make its own antidote.

"We've been using Indian anti-venom for years," she said, adding one treatment can cost up to $200.

"If you can make your own anti-venom from endemic species then you can treat patients with one or two vials rather than 10 or 20, which can have serious side effects."

Anti-venom, a distilled serum produced by triggering the body's natural defences, can cause high blood pressure, breathing problems and itching.

ANTIDOTE FROM HORSES, SHEEP

Snake aficionado Roshan Pemmawabu, a burly 30-year-old, nearly died from a Russell's viper bite one month ago when a friend brought him what they thought was a non-poisonous python.

"I was seeing everything in double, so I knew the venom had broken into my body," he told Reuters. "After that, I threw up foul green stuff from my stomach."

Doctors were forced to give him a whopping 110 vials of anti-venom to quell the poison, which had caused bleeding, neurological problems and kidney failure.

Ariaratnam said the lab started milking snakes in April as a first step to making antidotes so that patients like Pemmawabu, or those who stumble onto the slithery creatures by accident, can avoid dangerously high doses of imported anti-venom.

But weekly milkings are not enough because Sri Lanka lacks the facilities to produce antidotes -- created by injecting horses or sheep with increasingly higher doses of poison to trigger production of antibodies.

The fortified blood must then be harvested and purified to isolate the life-saving serum in complicated steps that can performed only by qualified technicians.

"We have seen some interest from labs in Egypt and the UK, but nothing is finalised," she said. "It can take years for us to finally develop our own anti-venom, but our ultimate goal is to reduce the morbidity rate."

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager