Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi Everyone:

I just read this thread on Dr. Fry's forum this morning. Anyone who keep venomous needs to read this. It's an important lesson learned the hard way.

Best,

Al
Envenomation by Shed Fang

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Confidence is what you feel before you comprehend the situation.

I just shared this with my staff; thanks for posting this. We oftentimes think that once the snake is out of its exhibit that everything is okay...well, not always as this account attests to.

Rob Carmichael, Curator
The Wildlife Discovery Center
Lake Forest, IL

>>Hi Everyone:
>>
>>I just read this thread on Dr. Fry's forum this morning. Anyone who keep venomous needs to read this. It's an important lesson learned the hard way.
>>
>>Best,
>>
>>Al
>>Envenomation by Shed Fang
>>
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>>Confidence is what you feel before you comprehend the situation.
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Rob Carmichael, Curator
The Wildlife Discovery Center at Elawa Farm
Lake Forest, IL

Definitely makes you think twice before cleaning cages...

Thanks for sharing...

Chris
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Chris Smith
Contact
Captive Bred Herps

The guy was covering up an actual bite by claiming to be impaled by a fang. Just think about it after you review his history of bites and his level of intelligence (assessed by reading his posts on the fauna forums). I find it very hard to believe that you can poke yourself with a shed fang so hard that it sticks in you to the point of bleeding simply by cleaning a cage.

I honestly have not followed this fella's previous posts enough to have an opinion on his potential veracity. This much I can say: I was bitten by a B. aritans once, a single fang impaling the tip of a finger while force-feeding. The bite required 2 10cc vials of SAIMR. I was back at work the next day. Thirty five years later, there is a small dimple in the finger tip from necrosis. I surely do have difficulty believing that a shed fang could cause the need for 8 vials of antivenin.

~~Greg~~

What a coincidence! I was just going to post my experience from yesterday & noticed this thread.
I was cleaning out dirty snake water bowls in my sink yesterday & when I finished the screen covering the drain was clogged with cypress & pine shavings & snake sh!t - I reached into this mess, with my hand, to clear it so it could drain, & it felt like my finger had caught on a piece of cypress mulch; anyways, I pulled back & felt a stab as it stuck into my finger - I thought,"Oh, crap"! & looked at my finger & there sticking out of it, more than halfway imbedded was a more than 1/2" C.atrox fang!
I wasn't too worried about envenomation, as it had passed through the snake's digestive system & had been sitting in the water bowl, but I was, & am, worried about what kind of infection I might get from injecting who knows what kind of nasty pathogens that deeply into my finger!
It bled alot & I washed it with Betadine, but my finger is noticibly swollen, stiff, & it hurts - I'll be following up with a tetanus shot on Monday &, if it isn't feeling & looking better, I'll probably take a course of antibiotics.
Cheers!
Max
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"I got out of the business because it's almost impossible to do business without breaking a law some place, whether you knowingly do it or not."
Tom Crutchfield

The severity was the questionable issue. As Dr. Wuster mentioned, things really did not add up to possibly need 8 viles of the former S.A.I.M.R polyvalent with the minimal volume of venom which could have been held in a fang. Especially the amount which would have been available to exposure after considering depth and crystalized venom stuck inside the fang.

Just what I saw.

I am glad to hear you came out alright though. I am sure it was not the most relaxing experience.

Ok, so you jammed your finger into a fang. Maybe you should be more careful around your stuff, but I still find it hard to believe someone could impale the backside of their hand with a fang. What in the world would you be doing to provide enough force to get a fang to go into the BACK of the hand/finger? I can understand pushing a finger into a fang (barely, because when I feel a prick I dont keep pushing) but not pulling your hand back into a fang. Why would you do that? I am just thinking about the hand motions you would go through when cleaning a cage and find it almost impossible to get a fang caught on the back of the hand/finger during normal motions. Thats all! Just think about it!

I am not aware of the case being talked about. But do have knowledge of several keepers having reactions to shed fangs. These reactions range from mild to severe medical problems but were must likely due to allergies and not envenomation as we know it.

Jim Harrison

How many times has he been envenomated by either a live fang or shed?

Haven't we all known that we need to be cautious of shed fangs? Or is this an extraordinary case from extraordinary circumanstances???

I am kind of thrown back as far as the source as well.....another balck eye for venomous keepers in my opinion.

Al, you're my mentor!
Shane
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Shane's Herp Lifelist
http://www.geocities.com/shane77@sbcglobal.net/my_page.html

>>Hi Everyone:
>>
>>I just read this thread on Dr. Fry's forum this morning. Anyone who keep venomous needs to read this. It's an important lesson learned the hard way.

I don't know, someting is odd here. If this were some hyper-toxic Aussie elapid, where a few mg are enough to kil you, then I could believe it, but with a puff adder?

Put simply, puff adder venom is not that potent drop for drop or dried crystal for dried crystal - to kill someone, you need something of the order of 50 mgor more of dried venom. 8 vials of SAIMR is the sort of dose you would use for a serious bite that injects a large amount of venom.

How much venom is contained dried in a shed fang? How much of that is dissolved and absorbed into the flesh in the seconds that the fang was stuck in the skin? Surely only a very tiny fraction of what would be injected in a bite - only a few mg at most.

I have seen snake handlers impale themselves on freshly shed fangs of Bothrops spp. and suffer nothing more than a swollen digit for a few hours - I have a very hard time understanding how a normal person would get a major envenomation from a puff adder in this way.

I am not doubting that the incident took place, but if it did as described, then there is some extra angle to it that we are missing so far.

Cheers,

WW
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WW Home

....is being too kind
The post is that of a nutcase & I'm amazed Al you'd believe any of it! Guarantee any fang that went thru the GI tract of a snake..has no venom left on it or in it when it leaves the exhaust port!
Now I wonder if the good professor might take a few moments to explain/ponder this...
It is my rudimentary understanding that their are opisthoglyphs that have rigid fangs & those whose glyphs can be erected via movable maxillary/(pre-maxillary?)bones. Is this firstly factual? & secondarily...does the presence or absence of this trait indicate evolutionary convergence to their modern rear fanged status or are all the opistho's directly related, & thus this retractable fang trait would be a derived character?
As always we appreciate your presence & insights here & elsewhere...

Cheers, John Gunn

John:

I posted this in the first place as something that could be overlooked as a hazard to keepers. I've seen my Puff Adder and Death Adder eject fangs during a strike that I recovered because I saw where it went. So, I thought it was a plausable that someone could be stuck by an un-seen fang.

I too was wondering just how much venom a shed Bitis fang could hold and why so much A/V was required. I know the physician who treated Vinny, maybe some of the answers can be found with him.

Al

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Confidence is what you feel before you comprehend the situation.

You may know the physician, but please please please let me know who they are. I want to know because any physician that would talk about the specifics of a case of one of their patients (at least facts that the patient hasn't admitted to on their own) with a curious private individual should not be practicing.

I would of course either take Vinnys post and simply ask is this factual or not. No breach of patient Dr. confidentiality there or get Vinny to get a copy of the treatment summary and make it public since it's his story. I just find it strange that his Xmass envenomation never made the press.

Al
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Confidence is what you feel before you comprehend the situation.

Let me know what you find out... I distinctly remember years ago getting stuck by a copperhead fang while scrubbing a cage out. I had dumped the bedding, removed everything from the cage, and proceeded to scrub everything down. I felt a prick and looked and had a copperhead fang shoved about half of its length into the palm of my hand about medial to the base of my thumb and the medial portion of my wrist. I plucked the fang out and went back to cleaning and thought nothing of it as I figured:
1) amount of venom present on the fang would be minimal
2) it is probably a fang that passed through the digestive system and is now void of any active venom proteins and
3) there wasn't much I could do about it at that point other than just watch it.

I didn't get the nasty metallic taste in my mouth that we all know is a sign that tomorrow is NOT going to be a good day... Nothing ever developed (and yes I do realize this is just one isolated case that I'm giving an example of).

I think Jim Harrison hit the nail on the head when he said that a major reaction is more likely the result of allergies and not that of envenomation proper.

Could the shed fang that hadn't passed through the digestive system still have some venom on it and cause some swelling etc??? Possibly, but as I've said on this forum before... Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and taking this as a first hand account from a less than reliable source at best, I'd have to see something more.

Still scrubbing cages barehanded and practicing shed-fang acupuncture,

Bobby Neal

no way!
I'll start scrubbing cages from now on with steel plated welding gloves!

You guys got me so skeered now that I'm thinking about getting rid of ALL my HOT's and start breeding Thamnophis!

uh, wait, aren't those venomous too?

A bit of arithmetic on the amount of venom in a fang:

- According to the diagram of a rattlesnake fang longitudinal section in Klauber's epic volume, the diameter of the venom canal in a fang is about 1/20th the length of the fang.

- Let's assume a puff adder fang with a venom canal 1 mm across and 20 mm long (generous, to be sure). The volume of the venom canal would be the radius squared times pi times the length of the fang, or 0.25 * 3.14 * 20 = 15.7 cubic millimetres - call it 16 - that is to say 16 microlitres. If this entire volume of the fang canal was full of liquid venom when the fang was shed (and obviously lost externally, not digested), then the 16 microlitres of venom would weigh approx 16 milligrams. In general, approx. 1/4 of the wet weight of the venom is solids, i.e., the 16 milligrams of wet venom would dry into 4 milligrams of dry venom, i.e., a very small fraction of the usual venom yield of 100-200 mg.

- Taking it further, how much of these 4 mg would be absorbed into tissues from a fang that is accidentally poked into the skin? Anyone who has ever had to wash dried-on spitting cobra venom off their goggles or camera lens knows that venom, once dried, is not that easily or quickly dissolved. Moreover, if the entire venom canal was full of dried venom, the inner parts, away from the two orifices, would be out of reach of the tissue fluids that might dissolve it. So, my guess is that less than half of the venom that might possibly be in the fang would ever get into the wound, or in this example 2 mg - compared to a lethal dose of 50-100 mg.

Given that 8 vials of SAIMR antivenom for puff adder bites (likely to have injected at least 10s if not 100s of mg of venom) would be considered a large dose, this simply does not compute. Either the patient had some sensitivity reaction (does that make sense from the symptoms?) and the antivenom was given in error, or we are missing something else here.

There have been documented cases of serious envenomation from puncture wounds from dried Australian elapid skulls, to the concept as a whole is not absurd, but thisparticular case raises more questions than it can answer.

John, regarding your rear-fang question: All colubroid snakes have some movement in their maxillae. Some rear-fangs, like Waglerophis and Xenodon as wel as boomslangs, have a lot more than others.

Regarding the evolution of rear-fangs, chances are that the earliest colubroids may already have had grooved rear fangs. However, the character is highly evolutionarily labile, and grooved fangs have been lost and gained multiple times int he "Colubridae", so it is hard to trace any particular feature back with any degree of certainty.

Cheers,

Wolfgang
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WW Home

That calculation was stolen directly from my 8th grade math book.

Dr. Wuster...are you going to be on CSI next season?

>>That calculation was stolen directly from my 8th grade math book.

Nah, copied it from my old one

>>Dr. Wuster...are you going to be on CSI next season?

Apologies for being dense - what is CSI? (although this does probably answer your question in the negative... )

Cheers,

WW
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WW Home

It is a forensic science show. I have not seen more than one episode but it is causing some court trouble here in the US with juries having ridiculously high expectations to prove a case (ex. DNA for everything).

Your breaking apart of this case here was quite impressive and detailed, so I figured I would applaud you with a light joke. Sorry I didn't factor in this show not being aired worldwide.

Nah, the BBC 1 or BBC 2 probably wouldn't carry it.
However, we do get "Hustle" over here! LOL!

Randal

I once stepped on a shed pygmy rattler fang that had fallen on the floor of my snake room during cage cleaning(another reason to always wear shoes in the hot room).I felt a small sting and just thought it was a small piece of glass as I had broken a light bulb earlier that day, about 30 minutes later I got a pair of tweezers and removed the object from my foot and discovered what it really was. There was no swelling or pain after I removed the fang.

I know Puff adder venom is more potent,but I still don't buy that story.
Ryan