the rise of bites of snake in Bangladeshparticularly the poisonous Russell’s viper which was declared extinct in 2002 but whose population has grown since then, has sparked alarm, amid calls for calm from the authorities.
“This year, until June 12, we have received 16 patients and five of them have died,” a spokesperson for the university hospital in the northern city of Rajshahi, Mahbubur Rahman, told EFE, noting that this center has recorded 69 deaths and 235 hospitalizations in a decade.
with the media bangladeshi Echoing cases, the Minister of Health, Samanta Lal Sen, called for “not to panic but to be cautious” and assured that the country has sufficient antidote and means.
“I can assure everyone that the treatment for bites has been delivered to districts and other areas, and health workers have been trained,” he said in a video message.
The russell’s viper, which is found in other Asian countries such as neighboring India, went from being considered extinct to appearing on the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as “near threatened” in 2015, when it was present in 17 of the 64 districts of Bangladesh.
“It seems that the population of the snake Russell’s is increasing in Bangladeshso to a certain extent the panic is logical,” the IUCN representative in the Asian country, Muhammad Mehedi Ashan, told EFE.
The Forest Department of Bangladesh He attributed this increase, in a message published on Saturday, to the reduction in the number of natural predators of snakes due to deforestation and the extension of crop fields, while calling for extreme precautions in the event of sighting of a viper. .
Firoj Jaman, professor of zoology at the University of Dhaka, told EFE that the number of snakes is also growing due to the increasingly frequent floods, since the viper is a “good swimmer.”
Every year, approximately 7,500 people die from bites of snakes in Bangladeshaccording to government data, a country that has about 28 poisonous species.
