Snake bite victims are endangering medical staff by bringing the reptiles with them to hospital, doctors say.<\/p>\n
In Queensland’s Wide Bay region, doctors have come face to face with some of the world’s most venomous snakes captured by patients believing it will help with identification and treatment.<\/p>\n
In one case earlier this month, emergency staff at Bundaberg Hospital, four hours north of Brisbane, were handed a plastic food container with a small eastern brown snake inside peering back at them.<\/p>\n
The incident has prompted the hospital’s director of emergency medicine, Adam Michael, to warn patients to leave snakes alone.<\/p>\n
“We honestly don’t want people interacting with snakes any more than they already have,” Dr Michael said.<\/p>\n
“Any attempts to either get close to a snake to catch or to kill, or to photograph the snake, just puts people at risk.”<\/p>\n
Michael said the eastern brown brought in earlier this month was “not very well secured” and was wriggling around trying to get out.<\/p>\n
“The staff got a fright and the serious consequence of that is it delays people’s time to treatment,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We want people to be able to get seen and assessed quickly and having a live snake in the department slows up that process.”<\/p>\n
rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Snake bite victims are endangering medical staff by bringing the reptiles with them to hospital, doctors say. In Queensland’s Wide Bay region, doctors have come face to face with some of the world’s most venomous snakes captured by patients believing it will help with identification and treatment. In one case earlier this month, emergency staff […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":9621,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9622,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9620\/revisions\/9622"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}