Snakebites kill 14 lakh in 19 years, make Covid-19 toll look small

CHENNAI: If you are mortally scared of Covid-19 that has killed about 21,130 people in India so far, taste this.
An eye-popping 14 lakh people died of snakebites between 2000 and 2019, at an average of more than 70,000 people per year. Worse, about 70% of these deaths occurred in eight states --Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana), Rajasthan and Gujarat.They are all limited low-altitude states, and victims were mostly from rural areas.
And which is the worst period of a year for humans against this death slithering under their feet? You guessed it right -- monsoon period from June to September. More than 50% of the venom victims died during these four-month wet period. Data further showed that most deaths were caused by Russell’s vipers, followed by kraits and cobras.
These are the data tumbling out of the nation’s largest-ever survey done by Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR), at the University of Toronto, Canada, along with Indian and the UK partners, expanding the results of their original study conducted in 2011.
The data is the largest-ever nationally representative mortality survey to include snakebites under the Million Death Study (MDS).
These deadly results were largely responsible for convincing the World Health Organization (WHO) to recognize snakebite as a top-priority neglected tropical disease (NTD) and changing world opinion about the public health importance of snakebite. As a result, WHO revised its global estimates of annual snakebite mortality to 80,000 –1.40 lakh, say researchers, who included the reputed herpetologist Romulus Whitaker of Chennai. He said the study covered 6 lakh randomly selected deaths, and a systematic review of 78 Indian snakebite studies.
The mortality data available with NCRB clubs snakebite with other ‘animal bites’, and there has indeed been a wide gap between the official figures of about 9,000 snakebite deaths annually, and 45,000-50,000 a year quoted by private studies and surveys. Whitaker, however, put the mortality number beyond 1 lakh, saying MDS sourced it from public as well as private hospitals.
Senior author and professor Prabhat Jha, director of CGHR at Unity Health Toronto, said: “Our study directly quantified and identified the population most affected by fatal snakebites in India. We showed that the overall lifetime risk of being killed by snakebite is about 1 in 250, but in some areas, the lifetime risk reaches 1 in 100.”
To repair the scourge of gross under-reporting, it was recommended that the Government of India designate and enforce snakebite as a ‘Notifiable Disease’ within the Integrated Disease Surveillance Program.