I carry a small snake bite kit and have read the instructions. But, I have never had to use it and hope that I never need it. Has anyone any experience on this subject. I was told the other day that it is really an unnecessary item to carry and that the likelyhood of someone dying is slim. ???? I'm not afraid of snakes as long as I can see them. They usually go the other way if not cornered.

Search the forums. Bottom line: no snake bite kit really works. Some (the suction cups sold by Coghlins and others) are more dangerous to use than the bite itself.

Use only current information. Anything older than 3 - 4 years is influenced by mythology.

No, there is a snake bite kit with a good chance of working. it's called sit your butt down, press the button and stay calm and don't move until the helicopter comes.

Phat is correct. I had some extensive conversations a year ago with my son-in-law-the-ER-physician about this. He did his residency in southern California and got to see quite a few rattlesnake bites.

I was told quite firmly that tourniquets, cut-and-suck, the Sawyer extractor (still promoted by some) and ice are all definite no-nos. The reason is simple--pit viper venom acts by destroying the blood vessels, first of all the capillaries around the bite site. Anything that puts pressure on the site or might otherwise restrict blood flow is going to result in more severe tissue damage once the venom starts acting. In other words, serious complications, such as gangrene, are far more likely to happen if you try to suck the venom out or restrict blood flow in any way.

1/3 to 1/2 of pit viper (rattlesnakes, copperheads, water moccasins) bites do not result in envenomation. If you do get a dose of venom, you'll know within less than 5 minutes and usually right away (severe pain and swelling will start). It's a good idea to wait those few minutes before pushing the PLB button. If you didn't get a dose of venom, it's not an emergency and you can self-evacuate.

What physicians do recommend is staying quiet and keeping the bite area level with the heart plus, of course, prompt evacuation to a hospital that keeps a stock of antivenom. Promptly remove anything snug around the limb before it swells up (rings, watches, tight clothing, etc.). EDIT: Do clean the wound; it's a puncture wound and therefore subject to infection.

Prevention is of course the best cure--don't put hands or feet where you can't see. Snakes normally want to be where you aren't. The majority of snake bites occur in adolescent males who have been fooling around with the snakes.

All this info courtesy of my son-in-law. I hope it helps!

Please note that this info applies to the pit vipers native to North America, not to other kinds of poisonous snakes such as found in Australia!

I don't know how dangerous the snakes are where you live but down here you would never walk in the bush without a way to treat snake bite. What do I carry - one extra wide and long crepe bandage.

I recently re-certified my first aid training and the treatment for snake bite is still virtually the same as it has been for several years. Lay the person down, apply a pressure immobilisation bandage along the limb ,keep them calm and get medical assistance ASAP. We also treat all snake bite as potentially lethal as identifying the snake is not always that easy. For example not all Brown Snakes are in brown in colour and a number of snakes change colour from youth to adult.

Please note the above first aid information pertains to Australian Snakes. You should find out the appropriate treatment for the snakes that occupy the area you intend on hiking in.

I have had numerous snake encounters including some that were on the scary side (a big Brown Snake right in front of me) and I have always stood dead still and let the snake decide what it wants to do. Thankfully they have always wandered off into the bush.

Personal opinion, even if there is only a "slim" chance of dying then I would prefer to avoid it as you only die once.

Cheers,
Michael.

P.S. If your interested in reading up on the deadly creatures that can be found down here try this place:
http://www.avru.org/index.html

It sounds like one of those divided topics. I've heard opinions that 1) venom suction devices are good insurance, and 2) venom suction devices do more harm than good. I'm with Phat; if I were paranoid about snakebites, I'd sooner bring something that lets me call in professional help than try to treat it myself.

The only thing I'd do to treat a snakebite is clean the wound; I've heard that the majority of bites aren't venomous enough to threaten the victim, but I do know that all animal bites can lead to infection if not treated.

Thanks, Wolfeye; I forgot to put in about cleaning the wound--important because puncture wounds are particularly vulnerable to infection whether or not there's envenomation. I edited my post above.

There is still quite a bit of online literature around (note that most of it is not dated!) that advocates tourniquets, pressure bandages, Sawyer extractors. That's why I had the lengthy conversation with my son-in-law-the-ER-physician last year. He did some more research before getting back to me. Current reputable medical literature all says that such items do a great deal of tissue damage in the presence of pit viper venom and otherwise accomplish little. Be sure to check the dates of your sources! At least in this area, anything undated or written more than five years ago is definitely suspect. About the only source promoting the Sawyer extractor any more (per my son-in-law) is the Sawyer firm's advertising.

Please do note, again, that this info is specifically for North American pit vipers.... Other types of venemous snakes have different types of poison which require different treatment.

Thanks, OregonMouse! That was the clearest and most succinct summation of the rattlesnake-bite issue I have ever read.

Chaz

I guess you have copper heads and Water moccasins. While I used to have a snake bite kit, I no longer carry it. I have had one rattlesnake jump at me 4 times before I killed it, and nearly stepped on a copperhead, but the odds of a snake bite on the west coast is pretty slim. I think I would worry more about Terradactyls (If you ever saw the Flintstones movie)

I would think that cutting open the area with your Bowie knife, sucking out the venom and cauterising the wound - again with the Bowie knife only now its glowing red hot - should prevent snake bite death, unless its one o'them brown snakes...

I have been attacked by as many humming birds as snakes. Now a hummingbird bite kit might be useful...
Jim

Thank my son-in-law; he's the one who provided the information!

I have always stood dead still and let the snake decide what it wants to do. Thankfully they have always wandered off into the bush

From a snake's point of view this is almost always going to be preferable. You are much too big to eat. If you do not appear to be a threat, attacking you is just a dangerous and wasteful exercise with an unknown outcome for the snake.

The biggest difficulty comes when you suddenly encounter a snake at close quarters and it has no time to evaluate whether or not you are dangerous, only time to strike.

would this really help? this method would probably get my heart rate going way too fast..

i have one of those yellow rubber pieces of junk, and have always been suspicious of it.

so it looks like the current info would be to stay calm, and do whatever possible to get external help without exerting too much effort?

that is very bleak.

I think that Jim was engaging in a little bit of hyperbole here; not even Jimshaw would do that. Jim would use his teeth, not a knife.

Especially since he would have a dull knife.

All kidding aside, I have been bitten once and have attended two bites. My bite - from a timber rattler - did not even need treatment, so I did not seek any and it healed up just fine.

The second, my mother in law got hit on the ankle by a large copperhead. We sat her down and called her doc. He said to keep her resting, leg lower than her heart, go to the ER if the swelling (which might look scary) went above the knee, and come in for a tetanus shot in the morning. It all worked out OK with no further consequences.

The third was a kid on an outing. He grabbed a small cotton mouth which nailed him on the knuckles. He would probably have been OK except the ER doctor panicked and cut the swollen arm open to "relieve pressure and restore circulation." Since his fingernails were pink and had good capillary response and the swelling was below the elbow, the cutting was not necessary. Then the idiot shot the kid up with antivenin without testing to see if he was allergic. He was, and nearly died of anaphylactic shock. On the other hand, he had a righteous scar from wrist to elbow that he got to brag about. The bite site itself healed without any scarring or loss of use.

So my experience is, don't panic.

Wow that good to know. I have a snake bite kit in my camelbak that I take when Im mountain biking. Guess I don't need it.
I see rattle snakes all the time when I'm riding on the trail. I usually just walk around them but lately I've pushed them off the trail with a long yucca stick. Would hate for the next person cruising down the trail on their bike not see it in time to stop safely.

Cesar,
Pushing them off the trail is the right response. Rattlesnakes are surprisingly intelligent and will learn to avoid area where they experience discomfort. And being pushed around with a yucca stalk must be a pretty uncomfortable, anxiety provoking experience for an animal as basically helpless as a rattlesnake.

I actually have some direct experience with snakebite, when I was a kid I kept snakes as pets and had a couple of copperheads among them, used to milk them for venom and pretend I was a scientist. One evening during an experiment I wound up with a good dose of copperhead venom just above my left ankle, and I didn't want anyone to know because I was afraid I'd lose my pets. So I did some of the treatment you're supposed to do, compression bandage, suction, etc--no tourniquet because I didn't want to lose my leg, so I had some sense even then. It's a pretty amazing thing to see a wave of swelling visibly moving up your leg. Also hurts a lot. I was sick for about a week, went to school every day anyhow, limping along on a leg that just barely fit in my trousers leg. That was a little copperhead bite. I never bothered with the snake bite kit after that, lost confidence in it.

Today the treatment is to sit tight and let other people go for help, depend on getting to an emergency room and anti-venom. Even a copperhead can kill you if you disregard simple procedures like stopping where you are instead of trying to walk through it and get help. Some years ago a herpetologist was bitten by a copperhead and decided to walk a quarter mile to his car and drive himself to the hospital, pumped the poison through himself pretty thoroughly and died before he got to the vehicle.

Most lasting effect on me was a hole in my leg that was big enough to stick my thumb in, eventually healed over but it took months--and zero confidence in snakebite kits, you'd have to cut really deep to get to the zone the fang reaches, and unless you were really fast you wouldn't have suction on it before it circulated beyond reach.

Copperheads and rattlesnakes just want to get out of the way, standing still or taking a safe step back is all you usually need to do. But I've had cottonmouths charge my canoe a few times, defending a territory in the Spring. Works really well on me, I leave the area immediately. They have been known to come in a boat after people. If I see one lying on the bank I go wide around it.

I hear there are some pretty dangerous snakes in Australia, always have wanted to visit the outback. Not to play with the snakes, though.

Jimmy

Pit viper bites are very rarely fatal (wnating to say <15 fatalities over about 20-30 years? someting ridiculously small, in any case). From what I know, most of the fatalities are due to being allergic to either 1) the venom itself or 2) the antivenin (smaller chance of that now due to improved antivenin). the info on the first page is pretty much spot-on. Clean the wound take it easy, minimal exertion until you can figure out if you got a dose of the venom. If you did, urgent (not necessarily emergent) evac. *all bites and situations are different, YMMV.

What strikes me as weird is that you don't want to work yourself up and get the poison circulated into the central circulation, but you don't want to isolate it to a limb with a pressure bandage or tourniquet either. It seems that you want to dilute the posion into a larger area of your body, but not too much.

Prevention is indeed better than the cure!

I don't carry a Bowie knife. But I do carry a snake bite kit. Or have until now. I find it's just extra weight. The last snake encounter was me trying to corner a very large grass snake. He didn't like being cornered and the way it was striking at me you would think it was a bad type snake. Last summer I found a small snake(about a foot long) that was also striking until I decapitated it. Once when we were excavating for a spillway at a lake, we uncovered several dens of Cottonmouths. As we found them we would attack them with shovels and put em in a pile. We had 3 dozen snakes in that pile. Mangeled to hell. We had to round em back up as they were trying to crawl away. If watch where your going and where you put your hands. I think the snakes will oppt to go the other direction. Or you could make real snakes skins for your hammock. lol

I think part of the rarely fatal statistic is due to antivenom and prompt treatment, something people didn't have in older times. But part of it is also just dumb luck involving where you get bitten. If you get bitten in the leg and you just lie still you'll probably get over a copperhead bite just fine, the poison does its thing in your leg and your body deals with it. One of our hunting dogs was bitten once and hid behind the couch for about two days but came out just fine after that. We thought it had gone off and died someplace but it was just doing the right thing. If you try to walk out, you can pump it to other important places like your heart and die of complications. Rattlesnakes are a lot more potent, you can definitely lose a limb from that and if one tries to crawl into your sleeping bag, bites you in the neck, you can suffocate from the swelling. One of the criteria for severity of the bite is how close it is to your head. I think if I was bitten by a copperhead again I'd not be too worried, would just sit until I got some help. If it was a rattler I'd definitely be concerned. I've heard various things about quality of emergency room treatment, some doctors know what they're doing and some don't.

Jimmy

After reading all the posts on the snake bite kits, I'm ditching mine. What would be cool is if the GPS units everyone carries would have an emergency call button like the unit you suggest.

Thanks OM. Very good info.

Hummingbirds. Funny. When I was a kid, I used to live in California and we would kill any snake that we would find and scare the little girls. Then we would take a bucket or whatever fill it with water and dirt and the snake and call it snake stew. We didn't have Ipods or the Wii to keep us busy so we made up stuff to do. Snakes were fun to mess with. Maybe they will all come back to take their revenge someday.

i have one of those yellow rubber pieces of junk, and have always been suspicious of it.

Darn. Now I'm gonna have to find a use for it other than treating snake bites. I never liked the idea of performing minor surgery in the wilderness anyway.