Africa braced for snakebite crisis

Rural Africa is facing a resurgence of a persistent plague that rarely makes headlines: snakebite.

By June next year, stockpiles of the anti-venom that is most effective against Africa’s vipers, mambas and cobras are expected to run out because the only company that makes the medicine has stopped production. With no adequate replacement in sight, the death toll from bites is set to rise, specialists warned at a tropical-medicine congress last week in Basel, Switzerland.

“We’re dealing with a neglected health crisis that is turning into a tragedy for Africa,” says Gabriel Alcoba, a medical adviser with the international humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; also known as Doctors Without Borders).

Poisonous snakes might seem an archaic menace in such a rapidly urbanizing world. Yet by cautious estimates, snakebites kill more than 100,000 people worldwide every year (see ‘Death toll’) — more, on average, than lose their lives in natural disasters. And survivors often experience permanent physical and mental disabilities.In 2010, the French drug firm Sanofi Pasteur in Lyon ceased production of Fav-Afrique, an antibody serum that reduces the quantity of venom circulating in the blood of a snakebite victim. Made from the purified plasma of horses previously injected with small quantities of snake venom, the serum neutralizes the venom of many of Africa’s most dangerous snakes.

The antidote has saved many people from bites by deadly species such as the carpet viper (Echis ocellatus), common in West Africa, and the black mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis), found across the sub-Saharan region. But the high costs — US$250–500 per person — and a supply shortage mean that only about 10% of snakebite victims in Africa get treatment, and the company says that producing the antidote is no longer profitable. Cheaper products by competitors have forced Sanofi Pasteur out of the African market, says Alain Bernal, a company spokesman. Sanofi Pasteur is working to enable the transfer of know-how to companies willing to take over production of Fav-Afrique, he says.

Credit to Nature.com