BENGALURU: Despite the state government declaring snake bite as a notifiable disease and directing health department officials to ensure sufficient supply of anti-venoms, snake bite continues to be a major concern. Experts and medical professionals say the present antivenoms, which are being supplied, are not serving the required purpose.
The experts from Karnataka are working with medical professionals from AIIMS and Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) to approve the next generation anti-venoms using repurposed cancer drugs and conduct trials for the three largest species- spectacled cobra, Russell’s viper and crait.
Medical professionals usually presume it is a cobra, but it could be a Malabar pit viper, crait, or Russell’s viper. Ironically, neither the patient, nor the medical professional will be aware of the species. The common anti-venom kept is for addressing spectacled cobra bites, said a herpetologist.
Prof Kartik Sunagar. head, evolutionary Venomics lab, IISc, said anti-venoms need to be improved. “For alternative solutions, government support is needed. We are working on the next generation of monochromic anti-venoms, which are cocktails of snake venoms,” he said. Now, trials are done on horses or ponies, but in new antivenoms, they will be on humans, to produce better antibodies, rather than on foreign bodies.
Wildlife biologist and founder Director of Kalinga Centre for Rainforest Ecology, P Gowri Shankar, said the need for antivenoms is rising as many farmers and villagers regularly complain of snake bites in coastal and ghat regions. Noted herpetologist Romulus Whitaker said snakes are now being found in locations where they were not reported earlier, like in Kodaiakanal, which in the 1950s did not report the sighting of the Shield-Tailed snake or the high altitudes of Nilgiris, now reporting the sighting of vine snakes.