Toxic trouble: Venom adulteration is a common problem

Dearth of anti-venom serum (AVS) is believed to be solely responsible for most of the deaths caused by snakebite ? the most neglected (and preventable) affliction in India. But the notion is not entirely true. The problem also lies in the inferior quality of the snakebite antidote here. First, snake venom, the basic ingredient of AVS, supplied to most manufacturers are either fakes or adulterated with the poison collected from unidentified snakes. Second, AVS manufacturing units use a primitive technique which is not only slipshod but unscientific as well.

The problem begins with a lack of availability of snake venom, which is pretty costly. Just a single gram of the King Cobra venom costs about Rs 20,000, and Naja naja venom sells at about Rs 5,000 per gram. The exorbitant cost can largely be blamed on the vanishing reptiles, an outcome of the rapid urbanisation across the country.

To meet the huge demand of snake venom AVS manufacturers have to look forward to all and sundry who simply want to earn some quick money. Most of these venom suppliers are illiterate folk who capture snakes from the wild, extract the venom from the snake through a crude process (which often leads to the snake?s death) and sell it to manufacturers at a hefty price. They don?t hesitate to maximise their profits by adultering the toxin, mixing with it resin, sugar and so on. They even add venom extracted from unidentified snakes.

The entire process is nothing less than a criminal act because it ultimately leads to the failure of an AVS injection, and, therefore, the deaths of snakebite victims. In most countries, registered venom suppliers rear and breed snakes in specified farms and extract the toxin in a scientific way.

However, you just can?t blame only the suppliers for poor-quality venom. Most of the venom manufacturers in India are not equipped to check the quality of the poison supplied to them. Neither can they authenticate or identify the species of snake from which the venom is taken.

This makes a huge difference because an AVS made from Naja venom can be totally ineffective in a viper- or a cobra-bite victim. Moreover, the snake venom antidote is raised on frail and diseased horses (the making of AVS involves immunisation of a horse with venom and isolation of a specific protein from its blood three months later).

There?s hardly any monitoring of the immunisation procedure and sometimes the venom administered is unnecessarily overdosed, causing the death of the horses. And serum isolation and purification is so shoddy that quite often wrong proteins are collected. This leads to fatal reaction in snake-bite victims.

The government of India should immediately take steps to standardise AVS manufacturing. Or else, the country will keep losing more than 10,000 hapless people to snake-bites every year.