[Epidemiology of snake bites in the Republic of Ivory Coast]

A national survey was carried out in Côte d'Ivoire in 1979 in order to evaluate the incidence, morbidity and mortality of snakebites. This unpublished survey has not been renewed to our knowledge. Although 20 odd years have passed since, the survey is not obsolete and can be usefully presented at this congress. We associated a retrospective survey using health centre registers and a prospective survey performed in 7 health centres between 1972 and 1979. The incidence, estimated prospectively for rural areas, exceeded 200 bites for 100,000 inhabitants. This evaluation could be an underestimation because many victims consulted traditional practitioners. Annual morbidity was higher in forest areas (195 envenomations per 100,000 inhabitants) than in the savannah (130 envenomations per 100,000 inhabitants). Conversely, the case fatality rate was higher in the savannah (3.1%) than in forest areas (2%). More than half of the bites involved men aged 15 to 50 years. The risks were significantly higher for farmers, particularly in industrial plantations, where 27% of the total of number of bites involved 1.5% of the population. At the beginning of the 1980s, envenomations could be estimated at over 13,000 per 8 million inhabitants and the number of deaths 200 per annum.