Expert doubts popular notion that Australia's snakes are world's deadliest

Contrary to popular opinion, Australia's snakes are not the deadliest in the world, a leading Australian academic said.

David Williams from the University of Melbourne's Australian Venom Research Unit has called into question the long-standing claim that Australia boasts the most lethal species of snake on earth.

Australia is often credited for having 21 of the world's top-25 most dangerous snakes, based on an academic study in the 1970s, which tested the severity of a variety of snakes' venom on mice.

Williams, who also heads the University of Papua New Guinea's Charles Campbell Toxinology Center, argued the title should be judged on fatalities rather than toxicity. Using that criteria, Williams told Xinhua that India, Sri Lanka and Nigeria, among other tropical countries close to the equator, came out ahead of Australia.

"It's useless to measure how dangerous something is based solely on laboratory lethality tests. Venom toxicity and the number of mice killed with a snake's average venom yield, for instance, are interesting only from an academic perspective," Williams wrote on the academic website, The Conversation, on Monday.

"If you happen to be one of around 100,000 people who die of snake bites around the world in any given year, such facts are irrelevant. The same goes for just about any other venomous creature we might like to proudly declare as the planet's most lethal."

Williams suggested areas of the "tropical developing world" with several subspecies of viper - Russell's viper, Lancehead pit viper, carpet viper - were far more equipped to take the crown, as the number of deaths they caused each year far outweighed those attributed to Australian snakes.

Despite Australia's notoriety for deadly snakes, according to Williams, on average only two to three cases of snake bites result in fatalities each year.

Williams said of the 3,000 snake bite cases recorded each year, around only one-sixth of those - or 450 cases - involve the reptiles injecting venom.

"Within Australia, the low mortality from snakebite (and other types of venomous injury) is very much the product of decades of research and excellent clinical care, not to mention safe and effective anti-venoms," Williams wrote.

"It's the lack of these same attributes elsewhere in the world that renders snakebites such a potentially life-changing (if not, life-ending) public health issue." Endit