Snakebite Envenoming (Schlangenbissvergiftungen)

Nearly half the world’s snakebite deaths happen in India. Now, climate change is pushing a neglected crisis into a dangerous new phase. Rupsa Chakraborty reports In September 2025 Manju Prakash, a 41 year old software engineer in Bengaluru, slipped on his Crocs to step outside. A juvenile Russell’s viper, one of India’s deadliest snakes, had coiled inside one of his shoes. Prakash, who had lost sensation in one leg from an earlier surgery, never felt the bite. An hour later his family found him unresponsive with froth at his mouth. He was declared dead on arrival at the hospital. The incident made national headlines across India. Snakebite has long been regarded as a problem confined to remote villages and Prakash’s death in a semi-urban neighbourhood of India’s Silicon Valley challenged that notion. When flooding swept through Bengaluru in 2022 after 131.6 mm of rainfall in a single day, venomous snakes surfaced inside Electronic City’s technology campuses. “During the flooding, even the IT companies had snakes in their campuses and offices—something that had been unheard of,” says Nagaraj, an anaesthesiologist at Srinivasa Hospital in Bangalore. “Ambulances were stationed at the tech parks for nearly three days while snakes were being rescued.” Over 1500 km away in central Chhattisgarh, the shift is more dramatic. Yogesh Jain, a public health physician and founder of the Jan Swasthya Sahyog community health programme, has watched the snakebite season stretch from May into December, when it was once limited to the monsoon months of July to September. “There are clearly pointers to the fact that things are changing,” Jain says. “And by the time we actually start seeing the trend, it’s too late.” These observations align with what climate science predicts. Rising temperatures extend the number of months snakes remain active, while altered monsoons flood their …