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Report
Climate change raising risk of deadly snake bites in Africa, says WHO
FRANCE 24 English
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9/19/2024
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00:00
After weeks of severe floods in Nigeria's northeast, the government's warned that 11 more
00:04
states may be at risk following the release of water from a dam in neighboring Cameroon.
00:09
The deluges that have hit the country this month alone have impacted hundreds of thousands of
00:14
people and it comes as the whole of West Africa experiences some of the heaviest flooding it's
00:21
seen in decades. Now the WHO, the World Health Organization's warned that one side effect
00:26
of climate change induced flooding is a rise in snake bites. They kill tens of thousands of people
00:33
every year. Sub-Saharan Africa has around 314,000 snake bite cases a year and around 15,000 deaths
00:41
but faces a critical shortage of the treatments needed to bring those numbers down. Now the World
00:47
Health Organization's ramping up the availability of anti-venoms for the worst affected Sub-Saharan
00:53
African regions and for more on this I'm joined now by David Williams who's a specialist on snake
00:59
bites and snakes from the WHO. David thanks so much for making the time to speak to us. First of all
01:07
can you just elaborate a bit more about the scale of the problem and what the WHO's focus is
01:13
in Africa when it comes to improving access to anti-venom?
01:17
Sure, so snake bites are a really big problem in Sub-Saharan Africa. Every year there's some 200 to
01:26
315,000 people estimated to be bitten by venomous snakes and somewhere between 15 and 20,000 of
01:34
them die and about three times more than that are left permanently disabled. Now right at the moment
01:41
with the events that are happening in Nigeria it's happening in what we call the carpet viper
01:46
belt. These are a small species of viper that are very very common in northern and northeastern
01:52
Nigeria, in neighbouring Cameroon and Chad and Niger and with all this water on the ground just
02:00
as people have got to go somewhere, snakes do too. So this brings them into direct conflict with each
02:06
other and our colleagues who are working in Nigeria are reporting that there are hundreds of
02:11
more cases of snake bites and in fact there's been a chronic shortage of anti-venom such that the
02:18
government has just had to source an extra couple of thousand vials on an emergency basis. Now
02:25
unfortunately this is something that happens all too often so WHO really has recognised the need
02:32
to try and look at how we can make anti-venom supply more sustainable and ensure that the
02:37
products that people have are safe and effective and they're in the right places to be used when
02:43
needed. And so how are you doing that? I mean and is what you're trying to address some of those
02:50
issues that were made clear during the pandemic about the cost of Africa's difficulty in providing
02:58
its own or producing its own medical supplies? So exactly, I mean it's really important that
03:06
countries have their own capacity. Unfortunately with the production of things like anti-venoms
03:13
we find that many parts of the world struggle and if you were going to build a new anti-venom
03:19
production facility today, anywhere in the world it might take seven to ten years to get it up and
03:25
fully running. And of course we can't have people continue to suffer in that time frame
03:30
so we have to find alternatives. We're working with existing manufacturers to try and improve
03:36
the quality and the safety profiles of the products that they have and also so that they
03:42
can increase their production. We've developed a number of different products to help research
03:49
teams, anti-venom manufacturers and regulators understand the products much better and be able
03:56
to in future design and develop new products that will better meet Africa's needs.
04:02
And of course we're talking to governments at the moment about the possibility of pooled
04:07
procurement for anti-venoms. Governments banding together working with WHO to secure supplies of
04:16
products that we've already evaluated and found to be safe and effective
04:20
and making sure they're distributed to the right places.
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