Seconded. It’s a cool story, but it’s really shitty that Cory doesn’t make it clear that it’s not documented.
The article would have been just as interesting if it had been about the verified rat story in Vietnam, or even just made it clear that this is an anecdote not fact. I expect better from this place, it’s not Slashdot for god’s sake.
I’m no fan of the ‘snake! Yee-haw! kill it!’ school; but when ‘make a living’ involves ‘synthesize a veritable symphony of brutally elegant and unpleasantly synergistic neurotoxins, cytotoxins, and cardiotoxins; occasionally use head movement and advanced image processing to create a ‘synthetic’ ocular separation larger than the size of the head would allow in order to spit the aforesaid into your eyes more efficiently’, I’m going to go with some respect verging on fear…
Oooook!
Snake bites kill something like 50,000 people a year (more than the rest of the world combined) in India. “Live and let live” is great and all, but the snakes can start first with that.
You have part of the story right, but it’s a bit more complicated than just people being bitten by really toxic snakes. Yeah, snakes do bite and kill people, but people also fail to get treated.
While snakes do kill about 100,000 people and injure about 300,000 people each year worldwide (45,000 of those deaths are in India), a lot of the deaths and permanent damage don’t come from just being bitten, but from the inability to get healthcare in a reasonable amount of time. The snakes themselves aren’t necessarily the whole problem.
This article helps to explain. With snake bite, the “Golden Hour” for treatment is very important. Pursuing treatment late means anti-venom may need to be given in such large doses that it will itself be toxic or just fruitless. In some rural areas people will seek faith healers before (or in place of) going to get medical treatment. Also, infection is common in tropical areas, secondary infection at weakened wound sites with poor blood flow can kill. Many things can go wrong in trying to treat an envenomation, and some people never even try to get treatment.
The article isn’t just guessing. Studies have been completed on the numbers of rural people actually bitten and injured or killed by snakes versus those who got successful treatment. Independent studies had to be done because the numbers were so heavily underreported.
Fortunately, faster diagnosis of the type of snake that bit can at least help those that do rapidly seek treatment. Here’s an info sheet for one rapid i.d. kit to help lab identification of bites (this one is for snakes in Australia and Paupa New Guinea). In India, the government is trying desperately to let people know that, if bitten, they need to seek treatment. They’re also trying to get treatment more readily available. For them, just getting people to wear foot-covering shoes in fields would make a serious change in people’s health.
Yeah, I was being flippant. It’s very much a preventable issue without doing anything to the snakes. It appears that adoption of a snake bite protocol has already dropped the death toll even in the widespread absence of proper care, as the death toll used to be in excess of 50k a year. (Though I’ve also read suggestions that the Indian snake-bite numbers were masking a certain number of murders, as an significant number of people died after being bitten by snakes that turned out to not be poisonous.) It’s interesting to look, by comparison, at the “live and let live” policy that’s apparently been adopted for leopards, which are increasingly moving into actual urban areas without a lot of conflict with people. Mostly they just keep down the numbers of feral dogs and cats…
The government creates an elite team for combatting terrorist groups.
The elite team captures the terrorists.
The elite team wants to keep working, especially because there are lots of cool perks like having cool code-names and being able to dress up in funky customized costumes.
The elite team organizes recruitment of low-level, very low-intelligence flunkies into a new terrorist group, code-named after something scary like a snake, so they can always capture them and justify their existence. For said flunkies, the inability to hurt the elite team is a high priority, so instead of bullets, everybody uses extremely impressive looking laser technology that can’t actually kill anybody.
The leader of the evil terrorist group always wears a mask so that nobody notices that they’re also the leader of the gung-ho patriotic good guys (until of course the leader needs to be captured, then he gets replaced with some brainwashed flunky).
The Cobra Effect is responsible for GI Joe, and their enemies.
Now you know.
There was a similar program in 18th century Paris, specifically about reducing the rat population. People were paid by the rat tail. It seemed like a good idea until an inspector found a rat farm on the outskirts of town.
Saw some documentary years ago about certain groups in India that are rat catchers offering their service to farmers, but they do not charge - they eat the rats, and more importantly they also get to keep the stash of grain that the rats end up storing in their dens (usually quite a lot).
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