GlobalHealthCuratedmedium confidence

Snakebite Envenoming

A neglected rural killer with an effective treatment that rarely reaches victims.

Severity score

21.7

Limited · default weighting

Trajectory

Steady

What this is

Snakebite kills around 100,000 people a year and permanently disables three times as many, overwhelmingly poor agricultural workers in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Antivenom supply chains are fragile, expensive and often region-mismatched.

Score breakdown

Loss of life

32

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

34

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

8

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

1

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

18

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.