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Available for over a year

Good morning. It’s reported that global stocks of one of the most effective snake-bite anti-venom will run out next year and the manufacturers are not planning to produce any more, because it’s no longer cost effective to do so. They say they’ve been priced out of the market. Research at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine aims to create a potent new anti-venom but that could be some years away and there’s currently no comparable replacement. Well I’m not in a position to delve into the economics of all this but tens of thousands of lives will be put at risk in the most vulnerable parts of the world if that anti-venom disappears. The fear of snakes is ancient and archetypal in the human psyche as indicated by the fact that the bible mentions snakes over 80 times and the villain of the story in the Garden of Eden is a snake. From then the snake as a symbol of evil has wound its way around the human mind. When St Paul was shipwrecked on the island of Malta he was gathering up some sticks for a fire when a snake fastened on his arm. He shook it off but the onlookers said, “No doubt this man is a murderer, he’s escaped from the sea but justice won’t allow him to live.” But to their astonishment it was the snake which died, not Paul, and so started the tradition of having authority over snakes being a sign of sanctity with St Patrick, for example, being credited with driving all snakes out of the island of Ireland. Well all this might be quaintly interesting but are snakes a real danger today? Well yes they are. When we lived in Central Africa at first I used to cycle along dirt paths on my way to the university where I worked. A friend told me that this was extremely dangerous because a person walking gives the snake sufficient warning of his approach for the snake to slither away, but a person on a bike arrives so swiftly that a snake on the path can’t escape. It strikes, and because a cyclist’s feet and legs are near the ground they’re vulnerable to being bitten. I took the advice and it became my practice to make the journey on foot, more time consuming, but safer. So my sympathies are with the people of southern Africa fearing the puff adder or the black mamba, whereas it’s the cobra in North Africa and the Middle East whose venom can kill a human being in fifteen minutes. It’s estimated that in total some five million people are bitten by snakes each year, a hundred thousand people will die and some four hundred thousand are disfigured. The impact on communities can be severe when a family’s main breadwinner is unable to work. The progress made in the global fight against malaria is a great example of the ability of the human family to overcome the threats of the natural world - and I hope the same can be achieved for snake victims sooner rather than later.