A.J. Kharat and R.Y. Bhandare
Abstract
Snakebite envenoming is a neglected tropical disease emerging in the nexus between biodiversity and rural livelihoods due to climate change scenario. An integrated ecological-epidemiological Determination of the content and occurrence of snakebites in a season by the Nashik district in India was carried out following a concept of one health. Field survey of forest and agricultural and peri-urban households reported 18 snake species, four of which were medically important venomous taxa (Naja naja, Bungarus caeruleus, Daboiausseli and Echis carinus). The retrospective hospital-reported cases of snakebites in 2022 resulted in 1,156 cases note that they were highly in a temporal clumped manner. Incidence was highest and sharp in the months of June (294 cases; 25.43%), and July (250 cases; 21.63%). The annual burden was 678 cases (58.65%), which is the monsoon period (June-September) with June-July alone representing the burden of 544 cases (47.06%). On the contrary, the pre-monsoon and post-monsoon/winter seasons added about a fifth of all incidence. Cumulative trend analysis showed that there was a sharp inflection at the monsoon onset implying that burden is fast growing with the limited climatic window. The high level of snake biodiversity, as well as the extreme seasonality of occurrence comes to show that snakebite risk is a new feature of monsoon ecologic processes and settlement agrarian circulation. These results highlight the importance of health-system preparedness and conservation informed prevention actions such as biodiversity-rich agroecosystems that are chaotic in space and time arrangements.