Halloween was more than just spooky this year for Indian boy Deepak (8)! The boy was playing in his yard last Halloween Monday when he suddenly felt something on his arm. When he looked down, he couldn’t believe his eyes: a poisonous cobra had wrapped itself around his hand.
Before Deepak could react, the poisonous snake bit. “I was in a lot of pain at the time,” the eight-year-old, who lives in a remote village in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, told the New Indian Express. But the cobra stayed on his arm.
“It all happened in a flash!”
The brave boy then resorted to an unusual measure: “Because the reptile didn’t move when I tried to shake it off, I bit twice hard. It all happened in a flash!” Deepak gave the cobra a sample of his own medicine. Then the snake would have died.
The Indian boy’s parents then took their son to the nearest hospital. There he got an antidote. As the attending physician later explained to the New Indian Express, Deepak’s bite was a so-called dry bite, where no venom is released. Dry bites are painful but not fatal due to the lack of venom.
Snake bites rare in Switzerland
The boy was unlucky. Snake bites are not uncommon in India. Of the 63,000 people who died worldwide from venomous snakebites in 2019, 51,000 were from India.
Venomous snakes are quite rare in Switzerland. Only the viper and the viper are native to this country. Occasionally there are also bites. However, according to «Naturschutz.ch», since 1961 – in 2018 – no person has died from a snake bite by one of the native species in Switzerland. (obf)