Snakebites killed 1.2 million in India in the last 20 years

A staggering 1.2 million Indians died from snakebites in the last 20-years since 2000, says a new study, pegging India’s annual average snakebite deaths at nearly 58,000.

Around 70% of such deaths occurred in limited low altitude, rural areas of eight states - Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana), Rajasthan and Gujarat. Half of all deaths took place in the monsoon period.

This is a sharp increase from the previous figure of 46,000 annual snakebite deaths, as shown by the same group of researchers in 2011. Half the world’s snakebite deaths happen in India.

Available data indicated that most envenomations were due to Russell’s vipers, followed by kraits and cobras.

“Our study directly quantified and identified the populations most affected by fatal snakebites in India. We showed that the overall lifetime risk of being killed by snakebite is about 1 in 250, but in some areas, the lifetime risk reaches 1 in 100," said Prabhat Jha, senior author of the study and director of Centre for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto.

Snakebite, which primarily targets rural farmers and their families, was the most neglected of all tropical diseases. But since 2017, it has been prioritised by the World Health Organization.

In 2019, WHO launched its strategy for prevention and control of snakebite, aiming to halve the numbers of deaths and serious disabilities by 2030.

Nine years ago, as an extension of his Million Death Study, Jha and his colleagues had analysed the snakebite deaths in India in what was known as the largest ever nationally representative mortality survey to include snakebites. The study contributed towards WHO’s revised annual estimate of snakebite deaths.

In the new study published in the journal eLife on Tuesday, the CGHR researchers expanded the scope of the previous study by adding 11 more years of field data from covering 600,000 randomly selected deaths, and a systematic review of 78 Indian snakebite studies.

“Snakes are a vital part of our ecosystem as rodent controllers and are important in religion and mythology,” says Romulus Whitaker, at the Centre for Herpetology at the Madras Crocodile Bank. “Since deaths are restricted mainly to lower altitude, intensely agricultural areas, during a single season of each year, this should make the annual epidemics easier to manage. India’s tremendous snakebite burden is staring us in the face and we need to act now!”