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Shortcomings in snake bite management in rural Cameroon: a case report

BACKGROUND: Snake bites are an important public health problem in developing countries with most bites occurring in rural areas. Severe envenomation often occurs in children and following bites to the face. Prompt administration of potent anti-venom remains the mainstay of management. However in Cam...

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Autores principales: Tianyi, Frank-Leonel, Dimala, Christian Akem, Feteh, Vitalis Fambombi
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5465594/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28595590
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13104-017-2518-8
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author Tianyi, Frank-Leonel
Dimala, Christian Akem
Feteh, Vitalis Fambombi
author_facet Tianyi, Frank-Leonel
Dimala, Christian Akem
Feteh, Vitalis Fambombi
author_sort Tianyi, Frank-Leonel
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Snake bites are an important public health problem in developing countries with most bites occurring in rural areas. Severe envenomation often occurs in children and following bites to the face. Prompt administration of potent anti-venom remains the mainstay of management. However in Cameroon, the use of anti-venoms is limited by non-availability, high cost (where available) and poor mastery of treatment guidelines. CASE PRESENTATION: We present a 10-year-old muslim Cameroonian child from an enclaved rural area, brought to the hospital 12 h after a snake bite to the face, with signs of severe envenomation. Despite the suboptimal anti-venom dose administered to this patient due to a stock out of this medication, supportive therapy was beneficial in ensuring a positive outcome and satisfactory recovery. CONCLUSION: This highlights snake bites as a public health problem due to the lack of snake anti-venoms in peripheral health facilities, rendering them unable to appropriately manage these cases. National health policies should encourage constant peripheral availability of anti-venoms and the institution of an intervention package for snake bite management, comprising: treatment protocol, staff training, monitoring of compliance and community education to help reduce the mortality and morbidity from snake bites.
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spelling pubmed-54655942017-06-09 Shortcomings in snake bite management in rural Cameroon: a case report Tianyi, Frank-Leonel Dimala, Christian Akem Feteh, Vitalis Fambombi BMC Res Notes Case Report BACKGROUND: Snake bites are an important public health problem in developing countries with most bites occurring in rural areas. Severe envenomation often occurs in children and following bites to the face. Prompt administration of potent anti-venom remains the mainstay of management. However in Cameroon, the use of anti-venoms is limited by non-availability, high cost (where available) and poor mastery of treatment guidelines. CASE PRESENTATION: We present a 10-year-old muslim Cameroonian child from an enclaved rural area, brought to the hospital 12 h after a snake bite to the face, with signs of severe envenomation. Despite the suboptimal anti-venom dose administered to this patient due to a stock out of this medication, supportive therapy was beneficial in ensuring a positive outcome and satisfactory recovery. CONCLUSION: This highlights snake bites as a public health problem due to the lack of snake anti-venoms in peripheral health facilities, rendering them unable to appropriately manage these cases. National health policies should encourage constant peripheral availability of anti-venoms and the institution of an intervention package for snake bite management, comprising: treatment protocol, staff training, monitoring of compliance and community education to help reduce the mortality and morbidity from snake bites. BioMed Central 2017-06-08 /pmc/articles/PMC5465594/ /pubmed/28595590 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13104-017-2518-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Case Report
Tianyi, Frank-Leonel
Dimala, Christian Akem
Feteh, Vitalis Fambombi
Shortcomings in snake bite management in rural Cameroon: a case report
title Shortcomings in snake bite management in rural Cameroon: a case report
title_full Shortcomings in snake bite management in rural Cameroon: a case report
title_fullStr Shortcomings in snake bite management in rural Cameroon: a case report
title_full_unstemmed Shortcomings in snake bite management in rural Cameroon: a case report
title_short Shortcomings in snake bite management in rural Cameroon: a case report
title_sort shortcomings in snake bite management in rural cameroon: a case report
topic Case Report
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5465594/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28595590
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13104-017-2518-8
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