Congo’s hidden crisis: Snakebites and envenomation

Mbandaka, 580 kilometers (360 miles) upstream from Kinshasa in Équateur province, is a busy trading port. The shouts of traders plying items brought in from the forests are drowned out by the loud staccato of the ramshackle engines on the boats that carry goods downstream to the urban markets of the capital.

Away from the dockside hustle, the land quickly gives way to DRC’s vast jungles, sublimely hushed and peaceful after the bartering and backfiring outboard motors of the town. Here, the winding rivers and dense forests that sustain rural livelihoods are key locations to witness the lifestyles that bring the most risk of snakebite mortality and to see the depth of the challenge in creating an anti-venom distribution system.

The still calm of the Ruki River, a tributary of the Congo that leads to Salonga National Park, is broken by shouting from the fishermen in several of the canoes that thread a path along the river; they gesture up toward the huge tree canopy overhanging the banks.

A mamba has been spotted too close for comfort to the riverside village of Eala; perfectly camouflaged among the thick trees, it’s a few meters away from hanging directly above the apprehensive inhabitants.

The mamba is dislodged by a fisherman using a broken branch. Its graceful body loses grip and the snake drops awkwardly into the water, where fisherman Patrick Atelo impales it with a ndongo, a spear with multiple small prongs for catching fish.

Atelo has fished the river for years. “We meet snakes every day, crossing the river,” he says, adding that they mostly aren’t aggressive toward people. “They don’t attack unless they feel in danger … you get bitten by accident if you step on his tail [or you find] them in your nets.” The mamba writhes and attempts to reach the men with its open mouth, its anguished hisses audible even over the cacophony of euphoric shouts from the canoes. It dies, unable to land a strike.

Unless threatened, the snake killed by Atelo would have posed little threat to his village, as Congo is home to the mottled-green Jameson’s mamba (Dendroaspis jamesoni), a species that lacks the notorious aggression of the black mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis) of East Africa.

However, with a highly neurotoxic venom that can kill in three hours unless three to four bottles of expensive anti-venom can be administered (costly and inaccessible to most even in Kinshasa, and completely unattainable in the equatorial bush), this mamba, and the countless other snakes encountered daily, pose an outsized risk to fishing communities. A single bite could have life-altering consequences for an entire family if a death threatens to reduce total income and daily work.

With the mamba dispatched from its perch, the village returns to work. Even with a slight wind across the river, the close humidity and quiet of the equatorial environment lends the activities of the day a hypnotic feel. Seeing the perfectly camouflaged snakes of Congo in branches or bushes requires a sharp eye and high state of alertness, and, with much work in rural provinces consisting of intensive labor such as fishing and farming, an individual whose attentions are elsewhere, sluggish in the heat, is at high risk of accidentally encountering a snake.

Daily life in an envenomation hotspot