British herpetologist Paul Rowley knows how painful a snake bite is - he's been on the receiving end of three viper strikes during his career.
Paul Rowley holding a Rhino viper Photo: GHS Townsley. Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
Dr Rowley has spent 27 years extracting venom from some of the world’s deadliest animals at the Centre for Snake Bite Research and Intervention, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
The venom extracted is used to develop therapies to treat some of the more than five million people a year who are bitten worldwide by snakes worldwide.
About 500,000 of those bitten suffer amputations and other serious disabilities and 138,000 bites end in death.
Although a lot of people tell Dr Rowley snake venom-extraction looks like a pretty good job, it’s not for everyone, he asserts.
For him, working with animals is in the blood.
“I was a third-generation zookeeper from Chester Zoo, and I think one of my earliest memories of getting involved with snakes was my grandfather used to keep a glass vase in a cabinet at home at his house and it had snakes' shed skin in it. I asked about these when I was a tiny little lad and apparently my father used to keep grass snakes and dice snakes when he was a little lad so it just fascinated me that snakes have got no arms and legs and yet they’ve got fangs and can kill you.
“From a small child, I was really fascinated with snakes and even at around about seven years old I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up and that was to work with venomous snakes and that was something I was very fortunate to be able to accomplish.”
Dr Rowley’s dream of working with snakes inevitably became a reality and he spent years studying the fine art of extracting their venom.
“Basically what you’re trying to achieve is to pin the snake down with a tool onto a foam mat, ideally a camping mat… a sleeping mat, pin it down gently in such a way that you can then get your fingers behind the jawbones and then once you’ve got the head secure… hold the body as well and this is when an assistant comes in. They hold the back end of the body and then you offer the snake in such a way towards a petri dish or a beaker and then it will hopefully bite towards the edge of the dish.
“Depending on the species, you will normally cover it with some ripstop nylon or something called parafilm. It’s a membrane and gives the sensations to the snake that it’s actually biting into flesh.
"Once you’ve got the fangs in there then you move your fingers forward and massage the venom glands, which are just on the side of the head, and then once you’ve got what you think you can get from it you move your fingers carefully back into the original position and then reverse the procedure, pinning the snake down onto the mat and then use a hook to manoeuvre the snake back into its cage.
“What you don’t want to do is risk getting a bite - even after you’ve extracted venom - because you’re never going to get all the venom out of those venom glands and there will still be plenty there, if you had a bite, for the snake to put you in hospital.”
Dr Rowley makes a concerted effort to heed his own advice, however, in his profession, being bitten by a snake was always going to be a formality, or in his case, three formalities.
“The first bite was, I think, in 1993 and it was a young neotropical rattlesnake. Now, normally rattlesnakes are a painful bite but the neotropical rattlesnakes actually have more of a neurotoxic venom, so they don’t actually cause a great deal of pain.
"The symptoms, to describe it in layman’s terms, are probably very similar to being rather drunk – lack of coordination and slurred speech and just general unsteadiness – so there’s not a great deal of pain involved. My parents came to see me in hospital and (I) said ‘I’m not giving up me job, I’m not giving up me job’… I was in a serious situation and I did have a lot of anti-venom.
“The last bite I had was again a rattlesnake, that was in 2002, so 17, 18 years ago. That was, again, only a baby rattlesnake, but oh my goodness that really, really hurt and I’ve crashed motorbikes and broke collarbones and ribs in the past… no comparison to broken bones… I felt like somebody was grinding my bones together while sticking my arm in boiling oil. An immense amount of pain from a baby and I needed a lot of antivenom for that bite, so don’t dismiss the capabilities of smaller snakes.”
