With an aim to raise awareness about snake bites amongst the students, Gaon Connection, as part of its ‘The Golden Hour’ campaign organised a workshop at Bhartiya Grameen Vidyalaya in the Kunaura village yesterday, on July 18.
The workshop was conducted by Aditya Tewari — a Lucknow-based reptile rescuer from a non-governmental organisation named Paryavaranam Society. The workshop was attended by the students who learnt about measures to follow in the event of a snake bite.
“I learnt that snakes should not be killed if sighted. In case of a snake bite, the person should be taken to a government health centre that has anti-venom injection available. Also, time should not be wasted in going to quacks or jholachhaap [untrained medical practitioners] doctors,” Mansi, a student of ninth standard told Gaon Connection.
The workshop was attended by hundreds of students and teachers. It involved audio-visual aid by means of a projector to help the students understand the complexities of the issue.
“In my address to the students, I tried to focus my instructions on the ‘golden hour’ as much as possible. People, especially in the rural areas waste a lot of time in approaching the quacks and jholachhaaps. This jeopardizes the health of the patient as the critical time in which the person has to reach a health centre is lost. This leads to a spike in fatalities due to snakebites in India,” Tewari, the activist who conducted the workshop told Gaon Connection.
According to a July 2020 study titled Trends in snakebite mortality in India from 2000 to 2019 in a nationally representative mortality study, of the 2.8 million people bitten by snakes every year in India, 58,000 people die. And up to 94 per cent of the snakebite deaths are from rural India.
In India, around 90 per cent of snakebites are caused by the ‘big four’— common krait, Indian cobra, Russell’s viper and the saw scaled viper. The July 2020 study shows that 70 per cent of the snakebite deaths occurred in eight states — Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh (which includes Telangana, a recently defined state), Rajasthan and Gujarat. Uttar Pradesh tops the list with 8,700 deaths a year.
