SUN-SENTINEL (Florida) 21 October 06 Bites keep venom bureau busy - Unit handles education and emergencies (Madeline Baró Diaz)
Hialeah: Venomous snakes are the usual workday hazard for Miami-Dade venom officer Lt. Charles Seifert, but on a recent morning, losing his voice was a bigger threat than an angry water moccasin.
Seifert's voice had about had it after days of explaining the dangers of snakes, scorpions, spiders, jellyfish, ants and other creatures to groups of elementary school students visiting the Salvation Army for a fire-prevention event.
It is one of the many duties of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue's Venom Response Bureau, the team best known for responding to snakebite emergencies throughout the world.
The team members' exploits have earned them international recognition and television time on the Animal Planet network. Over the past month, they have responded to reports of cobra bites in West Palm Beach and Plantation and a water moccasin bite in Miramar. The latest was the capture of a water moccasin near a Pembroke Pines day-care center this week.
Don't taunt Africanized honeybees, Seifert told the students. Keep away from dogs with poisonous toads in their mouths. And don't kiss those toads, girls -- they won't turn into princes.
Operating out of a firehouse storage closet turned office, the Venom Response Bureau has two permanent officers. They maintain the antivenin supply for many hospitals in Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties.
While Florida hospitals typically stock FDA-approved antivenin for the state's native snakes, many South Florida hospitals pay a fee to the venom bureau to manage their supply, an arrangement venom officers say helps prevent the expiration of the costly medicine.
Administrative chief Al Cruz, who established the antivenin bank in 1998, said they hope to extend their arrangement, which includes south and central Broward facilities, into north Broward.
The unpredictability of the job keeps the venom officers on call all the time.
"My wife, she hates it," said Seifert, a father of five. "There's times I walk through the door, my beeper goes off and I walk right out."
Most snakebite victims the team sees are boys, "ages 14 to 40," according to Seifert. "If you're 40 years old and still picking up a snake, you're a boy."
That might apply to Seifert himself, a Miami-area native who traces his interest in snakes to 1977, when he was 6 years old. While picking up leaves, he found a snake and put it in a mayonnaise jar. After discovering it was a venomous pygmy rattlesnake, Seifert's mother marched him off to the now-defunct Miami Serpentarium to hear a lecture from famed snake handler Bill Haast. Seifert was hooked.
"The interest with snakes grew into a fascination which grew into a passion and is now what my wife calls an obsession," Seifert said.
Today, Seifert, 34, has more than 60 snakes, he said, about 10 of those venomous. And he has his own serpentarium, of sorts, at the A.D. Barnes Nature Center in southwest Miami-Dade, where the venom team keeps the snakes it captures.
The existence of the team has improved the response to snakebite emergencies, said toxicologist and snakebite expert Dr. Jeffrey N. Burnstein, medical director of the Florida Poison Information Center at the University of Miami Jackson Medical Center.
Before the antivenin bank was established, health workers had to track vials of antivenin at faraway zoos and animal facilities, a difficult task in the middle of the night, Burnstein said.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/sfl-pdvenom21oct21,0,5775581.story?coll=sfla-news-palm

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