How often do you see/treat snakebite victims? I live in AZ, and snake bites, while not especially common, aren’t exactly an unknown factor here. There’s also a vaccine for rattlesnake bites… but it’s also super expensive, and from I’ve heard it doesn’t really work well enough to justify using it for my own dogs. Thoughts?

drferox:

Mate, our snakes are an entirely different kettle of fish. For one, we don’t have rattlesnakes, and I really couldn’t comment with authority on how their venom works, but I understand it’s haemotoxic and causes necrosis.

(This fellow was at the Rattlesnake Museum in New Mexico when we visited last year)

Australian venomous snakes, on the other hand, are quite different. White rattlesnakes belong to the viper group, our venomous snakes are elapids.

(Taipan by XLerate at Wikipedia)

The venom of our snakes, depending on which species did the biting, contain neurotoxins (affect nerves), myotoxins (affect muscle), pro-coagulants (make blood clot), anti-coagulants (make blood not clot), nephrotoxins (affect kidney) and cytotoxins (affect cells in general). They do a whole mess of things.

(If you go to wikipedia, Australia had 5/10 of the most venomous snakes in the world,
and 4 of the others are sea snakes)

Now, I deliberately don’t work anywhere near the inland taipan, but I did work in Tasmania and venomous snakes on smaller islands are typically bigger and have more potent venom than mainland counterparts. Tiger snakes were our biggest problem, and Tasmanian Tiger Snake bites required 2x the antivenom of mainland bites, and bites from snakes on the small islands off the coast of Tasmania would require 4x to 6x. At $500, at cost, per vial of antivenom, these were expensive to treat.

Tiger snake bite symptoms typically go a bit like this

• Acute signs: Vomiting, salivation, fast breathing, collapse. Pets may initially seem to recover from this though, but its only going to get worse from here.
• Paralytic signs: a little while later (under 2 hours) we might see paralysis, altered breathing, bleeding from bite, kidney failure, destruction of red blood cells and destruction or muscle cells.

Cats seem to be partially resistant to the venom, either by being more agile and getting bitten less, or just dying before they make it home and get to be presented to a vet clinic. Once actually treated though, they seem to recover a bit better than dogs, possibly because they cope with the rhabdomyolysis better.

All of this happens over hours, so it’s not enough time for the immune system to generate a response. I doubt we’d ever have a vaccine for Australian snake bites, but our combined tiger-brown antivenoms will treat venom from anything other than death adders.

I don’t see snake bites very commonly now in suburbia, but I suspect that’s because we have more brown snakes and less tiger snakes here. We have some very big brown snakes in the parks and golf courses around here, but they prefer to run away than to bite.

I did some research, and the rattlesnake vaccine exists, but doesn’t seem to be effective. There’s anecdotal evidence of vaccinated animals having less of a bad reaction to bites, but there’s no way to tell if that was just because they got less venom in their system.