Plants take bite out of deadly snake venoms

From New Orleans, at a meeting of the Society of Toxicology

In many warm parts of the world where agriculture remains largely nonmechanized, farmers face the deadly risk of snakebites as they tend their fields. Therapeutic antivenins can be costly—and they require refrigeration, which isn’t reliably available in the developing world. A Nigerian pharmacologist has found in local plants a potentially cheap and easy-to-store antidote to all these problems.