Climate change raising risk of deadly snake bites in Africa, says WHO

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00:00After weeks of severe floods in Nigeria's northeast, the government's warned that 11 more

00:04states may be at risk following the release of water from a dam in neighboring Cameroon.

00:09The deluges that have hit the country this month alone have impacted hundreds of thousands of

00:14people and it comes as the whole of West Africa experiences some of the heaviest flooding it's

00:21seen in decades. Now the WHO, the World Health Organization's warned that one side effect

00:26of climate change induced flooding is a rise in snake bites. They kill tens of thousands of people

00:33every year. Sub-Saharan Africa has around 314,000 snake bite cases a year and around 15,000 deaths

00:41but faces a critical shortage of the treatments needed to bring those numbers down. Now the World

00:47Health Organization's ramping up the availability of anti-venoms for the worst affected Sub-Saharan

00:53African regions and for more on this I'm joined now by David Williams who's a specialist on snake

00:59bites and snakes from the WHO. David thanks so much for making the time to speak to us. First of all

01:07can you just elaborate a bit more about the scale of the problem and what the WHO's focus is

01:13in Africa when it comes to improving access to anti-venom?

01:17Sure, so snake bites are a really big problem in Sub-Saharan Africa. Every year there's some 200 to

01:26315,000 people estimated to be bitten by venomous snakes and somewhere between 15 and 20,000 of

01:34them die and about three times more than that are left permanently disabled. Now right at the moment

01:41with the events that are happening in Nigeria it's happening in what we call the carpet viper

01:46belt. These are a small species of viper that are very very common in northern and northeastern

01:52Nigeria, in neighbouring Cameroon and Chad and Niger and with all this water on the ground just

02:00as people have got to go somewhere, snakes do too. So this brings them into direct conflict with each

02:06other and our colleagues who are working in Nigeria are reporting that there are hundreds of

02:11more cases of snake bites and in fact there's been a chronic shortage of anti-venom such that the

02:18government has just had to source an extra couple of thousand vials on an emergency basis. Now

02:25unfortunately this is something that happens all too often so WHO really has recognised the need

02:32to try and look at how we can make anti-venom supply more sustainable and ensure that the

02:37products that people have are safe and effective and they're in the right places to be used when

02:43needed. And so how are you doing that? I mean and is what you're trying to address some of those

02:50issues that were made clear during the pandemic about the cost of Africa's difficulty in providing

02:58its own or producing its own medical supplies? So exactly, I mean it's really important that

03:06countries have their own capacity. Unfortunately with the production of things like anti-venoms

03:13we find that many parts of the world struggle and if you were going to build a new anti-venom

03:19production facility today, anywhere in the world it might take seven to ten years to get it up and

03:25fully running. And of course we can't have people continue to suffer in that time frame

03:30so we have to find alternatives. We're working with existing manufacturers to try and improve

03:36the quality and the safety profiles of the products that they have and also so that they

03:42can increase their production. We've developed a number of different products to help research

03:49teams, anti-venom manufacturers and regulators understand the products much better and be able

03:56to in future design and develop new products that will better meet Africa's needs.

04:02And of course we're talking to governments at the moment about the possibility of pooled

04:07procurement for anti-venoms. Governments banding together working with WHO to secure supplies of

04:16products that we've already evaluated and found to be safe and effective

04:20and making sure they're distributed to the right places.

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