A woman is recovering after she was bitten by an eastern brown snake that got caught in her bike chain on a northern NSW rail trail.
Eastern brown snakes are among the world’s most deadly but it was the bike rider’s lucky day, coincidentally a day before World Snake Day, and the reptile’s bite failed to deliver venom.
A local snake catcher says snakes are common on the rail trail and users should always carry compression bandages.
wtf?
as an Aussie I’ve ridden over a few snakes in my time as they are sunning on trials, always feet well up for this reason! scary!
compression bandages for snakebite are a dubious treatment at best and actively harmful in the hands of the untrained, much like tourniquets (which can be useful in the case of life threatening blood loss but have significant risks). Priority should always be on identifying the snake and getting to anti-venom ASAP. This is one thing where they’ll seriously consider using a helicopter.
Interesting paper, but it seems to talk about only a couple of cases, both of which were presumably incorrectly applied. To get a full picture we would need to know how many people have been saved by them.
As a counter case, I’ve applied a compression bandage to a snake bite victim that worked exactly as intended and caused no harm to the patient. It was on for about twelve hours and when they released it in the hospital, blood markers of envenomation appeared.
Cool, it’s down to cases as always, but I did a first aid course last year and that was the advice. I suspect it’d depend where (proximity to a vein) the bite is and how fast you get it applied. YMMV.