Send Bob Norris to an emergency medicine conference on the tropical island of Aruba, and what’s his idea of off-hours fun?
“I rented a Jeep one night and drove down a national park road,” he says. “In 30 minutes I’d caught two boa constrictors.”
Those would be for his collection back home, where roughly a dozen pythons, milk snakes and rattlers reside in double-padlocked terrariums in a specially heated room. Along with black widow spiders and scorpions in jars.
Norris is the doctor you want in the ER if you’re one of the 8,000 Americans each year who are bitten by venomous snakes. (Only six people typically die.) Director of the division of emergency medicine at the School of Medicine, he also is a specialist in environmental toxins, including snake venom.
A typical day for the doctor ends at 3 a.m. in the ER, and begins again at 11 a.m. with a visit to a Bay Area school or a lecture for medical students. Many days, he takes two canvas duffel bags to work. One is stamped with the logo of the Wilderness Medical Society and carries Monty, an African royal python, and Shere Khan, a six-foot-long Honduran milk snake. They travel, curled up and apparently content, in long cloth bags that resemble pillowcases. The second, slightly bulkier bag transports caged Jake the Snake, a “fully loaded” Northern Pacific rattlesnake who only gets outside at the end of a long aluminum pole with a big red hook.
Kindergartners and undergraduates will pass Monty around their classrooms while Norris talks about the wisdom of avoiding certain snakes. Especially pit vipers—rattlers, copperheads and water moccasins—and the coral snakes that cause nerve paralysis. “The typical rattlesnake bite victim,” he’ll tell you, “is a young male who’s intoxicated and showing off.” Also-rans: members of fundamentalist religious sects that “handle” venomous snakes and don’t seek medical care.
Norris will spend a month in India this summer, working with a World Health Organization physician who is developing a national protocol for treatment in a country where some 50,000 people die each year from venomous snakebites. “Physicians there are not adequately educated about how to use antivenoms, or are somewhat fearful about using them because of the risks of pretty severe reactions.”
Today’s antivenoms are purified, less allergenic drugs that are effective for hours after a snakebite, and the cornerstone of treatment is intravenous infusions. Long gone are the days of scouting-book instructions about how to make incisions and draw out venom. “We don’t cut wounds, or suck on them, or use constriction bands, or electric shocks or ice.”
If you are bitten, Norris adds, there’s a simple mnemonic that can help: RIGHT. Reassure the victim (or yourself); Immobilize him; Get him to a Hospital; and Tell the attending physician everything you can about the snake.
