2025-01-06
19 分钟Hi, I'm Apurva Mandavili and I cover global health for the New York Times.
About a year ago, I was sitting at a hospital in Kitui county, not far from Nairobi in Kenya.
My name was Beatrice Ndanu.
Okay, how old are you?
11 years old.
I have an 11 year old daughter.
Can you tell me about the snake bite?
When did you get bitten by the snake?
I was meeting with Beatrice at the pediatrics ward.
Beatrice explained to me in Kamba, the local language and with help from a translator,
that a couple of weeks earlier she had been watching her family's eight goats
and a red snake darted from between the rocks she was sitting on and bit her.
Her father rushed her to the hospital,
but to prevent the venom from getting into other parts of her body,
the doctors had no choice but to amputate her right index finger.
For months before I met Beatrice at the hospital,
I had been talking to scientists about what a devastating
and pervasive problem snakebite is across the world.
It affects some of the poorest people, and yet it gets really, really little attention.
Every year, about 5 million people are bitten by snakes.