re: National snake bite eradication program 1882

[Rakesh Biswas]

Esteemed colleagues in Bcc, 

Just thought of sharing this Interesting way of reducing disease more than 100 years back (and currently perhaps unimaginable) and i quote, 

"Sir Joseph Fayrer who championed the destruction of India's snakes as the best means to curb human deaths, wrote in a report to Nature published on December 28, 1882, that snakebite had caused the deaths of 11,416 people across seven administrative regions representing about half of what was then British India (including modern Burma and Pakistan) in 1869, but he believed this to be an under-estimate of the true burden11. Fayrer believed between 150,000 and 200,000 deaths due to snakebite had occurred in India from 1870-1882, citing 19,060 human deaths in 1880 and 18,610 in 1881. During this two year period the government paid out 23,623 rupees in bounties for 467,744 snakes killed under eradication programmes that Fayrer had fought to have instituted." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3767246/

Not sure why current global malaria eradication programs that focus on mosquito eradication come to mind, although again this it too futuristic to assume that we can ever be kind to mosquitoes as they are too low in the food chain and shouldn't merit another thought at the moment perhaps?

best, 

rb