A toddler in India killed a venomous cobra with a single bite, international media reported in late July.
Govinda Kumar, two, was in his home in the village of Bihar when he noticed the three-foot-long snake and grabbed it.
Kumar’s family said the snake coiled itself around his half and lunged at him. The toddler is then said to have placed the snake’s head in his mouth and bit down, Kumar’s grandmother claimed.
While the snake was killed, Kumar did not crawl away from the incident entirely unharmed. He was treated at the Government Medical College and Hospital after falling unconscious as a result of ingesting the venom.
Mateshwari Devi, Kumar’s grandmother, recounted to Indian media, “I was moving firewood near the house and the cobra came out. The child perhaps saw the snake moving and caught hold of it.
“We rushed towards the boy and saw he had taken the cobra’s head into his mouth. We then separated the cobra from his mouth and hands.”
She added: “The cobra died on the spot, while the child fell unconscious.”
Dr Saurab Kumar, associate professor in the GMCH Bettiah’s paediatrics department, told The Telegraph: “I received the child active and alert, but his mouth and face were swollen because of the reaction to the venom in the oral cavity.
“We were surprised and cross-checked with his parents multiple times to ensure the child was not bitten by the cobra to rule out that venom had not gone into his bloodstream. They told us he bit the cobra, and the snake died on the spot.”
He continued: “The child had eaten a part of the cobra, and the venom had gone into his digestive tract, unlike in the cases where the cobra bites the person and venom goes into the blood and triggers neurotoxicity.
“We gave him anti-allergy medicine and kept him under watch. As he didn’t develop any symptoms for 48 hours, we discharged the child on Saturday.”
The danger of snake bites
An estimated 5.4 million people worldwide are bitten by snakes each year, with 1.8 to 2.7 million cases of envenomings, according to the World Health Organization.
Between 81,410 and 137,880 people die each year because of snake bites, and hundreds of thousands more are left permanently disabled.