A singer’s tragic death highlights Nigeria’s snakebite problem

Ifunanya Nwangene was asleep last Saturday morning in her ground-floor apartment in Nigeria’s capital city when she was awoken at around 08:00 by a searing pain on her wrist. “A snake came up on her bed and bit her,” Ifunanya’s father Christopher Nwangene told the BBC’s Newsday programme. He was relating the events that led to his daughter’s tragic death, which has raised serious concerns about how hospitals deal with snakebites, and the availability of antivenom across Nigeria, which has the world’s third-highest incidence of snakebites.

Ifunanya, a well-known soprano singer in Nigeria – finding fame a few years ago on the local version of the TV competition The Voice, knew she had to get antivenom at a hospital as soon as possible. Her father said she also applied a tourniquet, tying a piece of rope tightly around her arm. This used to be the recommendation for snakebites to stop the venom spreading through the body – though this is no longer the advice as a tourniquet, which stops the flow of blood, can cause tissue damage and increase the risk of amputation.

Instead, snakebite victims are told to keep calm, immobilise an affected limb and seek emergency medical care immediately. But it is hard not to panic when one arrives at a hospital to find there is no antivenom, which happened to Ifunanya, meaning she had to go to another one. The 26-year-old singer phoned her father when she later got to Abuja’s Federal Medical Centre, Jabi – and he then called his brother, who lives in the capital, to go and check on her. She was not in a good way when her uncle got to the hospital – her tourniquet had been removed and she was put on a drip.