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Outlook: Bitten Six Times by Poisonous Snakes

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David Williams with Papua New Guinea Taipan snake

09/09/2015 GMT

Bitten Six Times by Poisonous Snakes

BBC World Service - Outlook, Bitten Six Times by Poisonous Snakes

Why one snake handler has invented a revolutionary new anti-venom

Bitten 6 times by poisonous snakes - why one snake handler has invented a new anti-venom

David Williams has been bitten six times by deadly snakes - and survived to tell the tales. The former snake handler now turned research scientist has devoted his life to helping snake bite victims. 
David works in Papua New Guinea where up to 4000 people are bitten by venomous snakes each year. Many of them die because they can't get to hospital quickly enough - and because anti-venom is expensive and in short supply. Now David has come up with a cheap and effective new anti-venom to tackle the problem. (including extracts from ABC documentary 'Dangerous Liaisons')

The award winning Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa's books could be seen as a mirror to her own life, as a young Parsee girl growing up in Lahore during the bloody Partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947.  Although Bapsi has lived in America for over 30 years, she often goes back to Pakistan, and her experiences of the upheaval and violence during that time have stayed with her - both in her fiction, and her work as a women's rights activist. She tells the BBC's Ella-mai Robey, why she puts so much of herself into her novels. 

In his twenties, Toru Koremura was earning 16,000 dollars a month as a stockbroker in Tokyo. His main objective in life was to make money and get rich. Today he's 32 and has swapped that lifestyle for something very different. Now Toru works with a small team of people who clean up the homes of people who have died alone.  There is a lot of work for him - the phenomenon of death by loneliness, known in Japan as Kodokushi seems to be on the rise. Toru tells Matthew Bannister - in quite grisly detail - about his work and why he made his unusual career change.

John Bramblitt is an award-winning American artist whose work has been displayed in more than 30 countries. He is also blind. His dramatic landscapes and portraits have vibrant colours and strong shapes. John took up painting after he lost his sight in his late twenties following a series of epileptic seizures. And it transformed his life. 

(Picture: David Williams milks the venom of a Papua New Guinea Taipan snake.
Credit: David Williams)

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