MWINGI, Kenya – Esther Kangali felt a sharp pain while on her mother’s farm in the east Kenya. She looked down and saw a large snake wrapped around her left leg. She screamed and her mother came running.
Kangali was rushed to a nearby health center but there was no antidote to treat the snake bite. A reference hospital also had none. Two days later, she arrived at a hospital in the capital, Nairobi, where her leg was amputated due to delayed treatment.
The 32-year-old mother of five knows this could have been avoided if clinics in areas where snake bites are common had stocked antivenom.
Kitui County, where the Kangalis have their farm, has the second highest number of snakebite victims in Kenya, according to the Ministry of Health, which last year estimated annual cases at 20,000.
In total, in Kenya, around 4,000 snake bite victims die every year while another 7,000 suffer paralysis or other health complications, according to the local authority Primate Research Institute.
Residents fear the problem is increasing. While the the forests around it shrink due to logging and agricultural expansion, and as weather patterns become increasingly unpredictable, snakes appear more frequently around homes.
“We are causing adverse effects on their habitats, such as the destruction of forests, and eventually we have snakes coming into our homes mainly in search of water or food, and eventually we have conflict between humans and snakes,” said Geoffrey Maranga, a veteran herpetologist at the Kenya Snakebite Research and Intervention Center.
Climate Change can also take snakes to rural properties, he said, since seek water in times of drought and wet shelter.
Maranga and his colleagues are part of a collaboration with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to create effective and safe treatments for snake bites and, ultimately, produce antivenin locally. The Maranga center estimates that more than half of people bitten by snakes in Kenya do not seek hospital treatment – considering it expensive and difficult to find – and seek traditional treatments.
Kenya imports antivenom from Mexico and India, but antivenom is generally region-specific, meaning a treatment in one region may not effectively treat snake bites in another.
Part of Maranga and colleague Fredrick Angotte’s work is extracting poison of one of the most dangerous snakes in Africa, the black mamba. The venom could help produce the next generation of antivenin.
“Current conventional antivenoms are quite old and suffer from certain inherent deficiencies” such as side effects, said George Omondi, head of the Kenya Snakebite Research and Intervention Center.
Researchers estimate that improved conventional antivenoms will take two to three years to reach the market. They estimate that Kenya will need 100,000 vials annually, but it is unclear how many will be produced locally.
The research aims to make antivenin more accessible to Kenyans. Even when antivenom is available, up to five vials are needed, which can cost up to $300.
Meanwhile, the research center also carries out community activities on snake bite prevention, teaching health professionals and others how to safely coexist with snakes, perform first aid and treat people affected by snake bites.
The goal is for fewer Kenyans to suffer like Kangali’s neighbor Benjamin Munge, who died in 2020 four days after a snake bite because the hospital had no antivenin.
Snakes are unlikely to stray from homes, said Kangali’s mother Anna, so solving the problem is up to humans.
“If snakebite medicine reaches the grassroots, we will all get help,” she said.
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