MWINGI, Kenya (AP) — Esther Kangali felt a sharp pain while on her mother’s farm in eastern Kenya. She looked down and saw a large snake coiling around her left leg. She screamed, and her mother came running.
Kangali
was rushed to a nearby health center, but it lacked antivenom to treat the
snake’s bite. A referral hospital had none as well. Two days later, she reached
a hospital in the capital, Nairobi, where her leg was amputated due to delayed
treatment.
The
32-year-old mother of five knows it could have been avoided if clinics in areas
where snakebites are common were stocked with antivenom.
Kitui
County, where the Kangalis have their farm, has Kenya’s second highest number
of snakebite victims, according to the health ministry, which last year put
annual cases at 20,000.
Overall
in Kenya, about 4,000 snakebite victims die every year while 7,000 others
experience paralysis or other health complications, according to the local
Institute of Primate Research.
Residents
fear the problem is growing. As the forests around them shrink due to logging
and agricultural expansion, and as climate patterns become increasingly
unpredictable, snakes are turning up around homes more frequently.
“We
are causing adverse effects on their habitats like forest destruction, and
eventually we are having snakes come into our homes primarily to seek for water
or food, and eventually we have the conflict between humans and the snakes,”
said Geoffrey Maranga, a senior herpetologist at the Kenya Snakebite Research
and Intervention Center.
Climate
change also can drive snakes into homesteads, he said, as they seek water in
dry times and shelter in wet.
Maranga
and his colleagues are part of a collaboration with the Liverpool School of
Tropical Medicine to create effective and safe snakebite treatments and
ultimately produce antivenom locally. Maranga’s center estimates that more than
half of people bit by snakes in Kenya don’t seek hospital treatment — seeing it
costly and difficult to find — and pursue traditional treatments.
Kenya
imports antivenom from Mexico and India, but antivenom is usually
region-specific, meaning a treatment in one region might not effectively treat
snakebites in another.
Part
of the work of Maranga and colleague Fredrick Angotte is extracting venom from
one of Africa’s most dangerous snakes, the black mamba. The venom can help
produce the next generation of antivenom.
“The
current conventional antivenoms are quite old and suffer certain inherent
deficiencies” such as side effects, said George Omondi, the head of the Kenya
Snakebite Research and Intervention Center.
The
researchers estimate the improved conventional antivenoms will take two or
three years to reach the market. They estimate that Kenya will need 100,000
vials annually, but it’s not clear how that much will be produced locally.
The
research aims to make antivenom more affordable to Kenyans. Even when antivenom
is available, up to five vials are required, which can cost as much as $300.
Meanwhile,
the research center also does community outreach on snakebite prevention,
teaching health workers and others how to safely coexist with snakes, perform
first aid, and treat those affected by snakebite.
The
goal is to have fewer Kenyans suffer like Kangali’s neighbor, Benjamin Munge,
who died in 2020 four days after a snakebite because the hospital had no
antivenom.
It’s
unlikely that snakes will move away from homes, Kangali’s mother, Anna, said,
so solving the problem is up to humans.
“If the snakebite medicine can come to the grassroots, we
will all get help,” she said.
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