A 59-year-old man in Switzerland was bitten by a West African green mamba, a slender tree-dwelling elapid whose natural range lies in the coastal forests of West Africa. The bitten limb swelled. Then the weakness set in, and it kept climbing until he could no longer breathe on his own.
The case, reported by emergency and intensive care physicians at Lausanne University Hospital with a toxicologist from a French military hospital, is a study in what happens when a snake from one continent bites someone on another. It was published in Toxicon.
