By Jonathan Watts – UK Guardian
The risk of snakebites is increasing across the world as reptiles shift their habitats to cope with rising temperatures and growing human pressures, a study of venomous snakes has found.
Spitting cobras in Africa, vipers in Europe and South America, cottonmouth moccasins in North America and kraits in Asia are coming into greater contact with people as a result of climate disruption and landscape change, according to the research, which was led by the World Health Organization.
Most species will suffer a decline of habitat, but a significant number of the deadliest snakes are likely to spread more widely, taking them into areas where they have not been seen before and potentially affecting billions of people.
“The overlap between humans and venomous snakes will be greater,” said one of the authors, David Williams of the WHO and the University of Melbourne. “You could consider this a risk of walking out of the back door, stumbling and getting bitten.”
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The study, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases on Thursday, aims to fill that knowledge gap. Using public and private databases, citizen science platforms, museum records, scientific literature and expert observations, the researchers mapped the distributions of all 508 medically important snake species across the planet to a granularity of 1 sq km. They then projected how rising temperatures would alter their overlap with human populations by 2050 and 2090.
