As far back as he can remember, Kali Chockalingam, now 53 and living in Echur, a village in Southern India, has loved snakes. He often got in trouble with his teachers for hiding them in his schoolbag. “As a young boy, I thought they looked like little dolls,” he said. Chockalingam hails from India’s Irula tribe, one of the country’s oldest Indigenous communities, known for their extraordinary ability to trace and catch snakes. From his father and grandfather, he learned the family trade.
Roughly 200,000 Irulars are spread out over three Southern Indian states—Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. And for the past 45 years, Chockalingam’s tribe in Tamil Nadu has run the Irula Snake Catcher’s Industrial Co-operative Society, India’s largest producer of quality snake venom, which is used to manufacture antidotes to snakebites, or antivenin.
Research has shown that antivenin made from the co-op’s venom has been effective in treating bites by the four most common venomous snakes in the country, the only snakes the Irulars are legally allowed to catch: the Russell’s viper, the common krait, the Indian cobra, and the Indian saw-scaled viper.
Still, snakebite deaths remain a problem. According to the Million Death Study, one of the largest ongoing global studies of premature mortality, around 58,000 Indians die from snakebites every year, the highest rate in the world. And a growing proportion of these bites come from less common species of venomous snakes in specific pockets of the country, for which, according to researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, available antivenin — also often called antivenom—are not very effective.
People living in India’s…
Read the full article here