There even is doubt that the inland taipan (“the world’s most venomous snake”) has caused any human fatalities in the past several decades. Curiously, the Sri Lankan and West African snakes that cause most mortality (saw-scaled vipers, Echis spp.) are absent from the usual lists or way down on the bottom. Australia itself has had only 30 deaths from snakebite in about 20 years, nearly a quarter of which resulted from people trying to kill or handle venomous snakes (usually Pseudonaja species, one of the brown snakes), while there may be more than 50 deaths per million people a year in Sri Lanka and western Africa. Today, snakebite deaths are rare in most of North America, Europe, Australia and other areas where outdoor workers wear shoes and homes are not easily invaded by snakes. The well-known venomous snakes of the Americas, Africa and Asia are mostly absent from the list and simply were not included in the study.ĭoes it do any practical good to list venomous snakes by how easily they can kill mice? Of course not - keepers and readers want to know which snakes will kill humans and which ones have repeatedly done so. Broad and colleagues working out of Australia, which partially explains the strong Australian bias of the list. Many standard lists of the most venomous snakes are based on a study published in 1979 by A. LD50 is the smallest amount of venom (stated in milligrams venom per kilogram mouse weight) that when injected into a standardized group of mice will kill half the subjects. This is not nearly the same assumption that leads to the most published list, where snakes are ranked by the toxicity of their venom to mice in standardized laboratory tests.Īlthough mouse tests (commonly called LD50 studies) are important so researchers can have standardized baselines for venom studies, they really have very little to do with what happens when a snake bites a human. Reality, however, is very different from easily found listings.įor the purposes of this article, I’ve made the assumption that readers want to know which snakes are most dangerously venomous to humans, those that are most likely to kill you if you should have an unfortunate accident. In fact, most references state that almost all the snakes of Australia are venomous, and some make you think you’d be taking your life in your hands just by walking through a garden in Sydney. A quick trip to the Internet or a look into some general reference books easily leads to a listing of the “10 most venomous snakes in the world,” all of which by some coincidence come from Australia and generally list the inland taipan Oxyuranus microlepidotus) as the world’s most venomous snake. Preparing a list of the most deadly venomous snakes is fraught with difficulties from start to finish.
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