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AT SPACE FARMSUS Your browser does not support the element., a family-owned zoo and museum in rural New Jersey, Parker Space keeps African puff adders, cobras, copperheads, rat snakes, pythons, boa constrictors, “a bunch” of cottonmouth moccasins and eastern massasauga rattlesnakes. “I’ve been slinging a rattlesnake since I was 12,” says Mr Space, who is also a Republican state senator. On December 30th, aged 56, he sustained his first bite. His local hospital injected 14 vials of antivenom, but his bitten hand remained stubbornly swollen. So he was flown to the Bronx, where snake-bite specialists and exotic-snake antivenoms abound.The Jacobi Medical Centre is a short drive from the Bronx Zoo. The hospital’s toxicologists, working in a dedicated snake-bite unit, are experienced. (Given that just 7,000-8,000 people in America sustain venomous snake bites annually, most physicians are not.) They also have easy access to the Bronx Zoo’s impressive collection of antivenom, which it stocks for all of the species in its Reptile House, plus more. That policy can be traced back to 1916, when a zookeeper survived a rattlesnake bite with an experimental antivenom supplied by an expert from Brazil, who happened to be travelling through New York. “There is no reason why the men who work in the Reptile House should be in danger of death every time a poisonous snake ‘goes bad’,” declared Raymond Ditmars, the zoo’s first reptile curator.In “modern history”, however, no Bronx Zoo employees have required the antivenom, according to Kevin Torregrosa, the current curator. Instead it is being doled out, most often, to pet owners. The Bronx Zoo is a “one-stop shop” for patients in the Northeast, says Mr Torregrosa; and in fact, the system is replicated across the country.Most hospitals stock two brands of antivenom, which are federally approved and work against indigenous snakes. But a run-in with a black mamba or king cobra prompts a call to a regional poison-control centre, which consults an index of antivenoms in stock at accredited zoos. Niche antivenoms are classed as “investigational new drugs”, and zoos pay for permits to import and store them. Leslie Boyer of the University of Arizona, who helped organise the index, says that a poison-control call is often routed to a zookeeper’s private number.
