What should people do to avoid copperheads?Ī. There are many more copperheads in Virginia.
Those snakes don’t go east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. If bitten by the timber rattler, there’s certainly the potential of dying from a bite. We’ve had people who have lost digits in the past. If you’re bitten on the hand, for example, and don’t come in right away and the finger gets really swollen, it may be hard to even get antivenom to that finger. Things can progress to a point where you have a lot of tissue damage around the site of the bite. What are the dangers if people do not get treated?Ī. Antivenom works better if it’s used sooner. How quickly should you seek medical attention?Ī. You can splint the bite area to provide comfort until you get to a medical professional. The only thing that you can really do is get antivenom. You do not want to put a constriction band on it. The primary thing is to seek medical attention and see if you need the antidote, which is an antivenom. After being bitten, what should a person do?Ī. Any movement causes pain.Ĭopperheads fortunately do not do significant damage to our cardiovascular system or hematologic system, so we don’t tend to bleed in other places. And if it’s a large amount of venom, it can go through the lymphatics and do more damage as it permeates through your tissue. The body’s own inflammatory responses will be set off, so you’re going to get swelling in that area. It damages the blood vessels, so that bite victim will then get bruising.
The venom is meant to digest tissues, and there are nerve fibers that lead to pain. If injected, what initially will happen is the venom goes into the subcutaneous tissues and starts to cause pain. Approximately 10% of bites are “dry bites,” in which no venom is released. It all depends on the amount of venom that is excreted. What happens to humans when they are bitten?Ī. In the second-most-common scenario, a person minding their own business might rapidly do something like accidentally stepping on a copperhead, which then defends itself. But from an aggressive standpoint, most of the bites that I see, the envenomations, the individuals are trying to pick up or are messing with a snake. When you hear that rattle, that’s when you are put on pause and you back up. Because they don’t have a rattle, people cannot hear copperheads, so they don’t notice them as easily as a timber rattler, which we have in the mountains. I don’t think they’re overly aggressive otherwise. I think if you’re trying to pick them up they are. They like places where they can shelter and be protected.Ī. They can get under the covers of things – for example, if I have a grill that’s covered up on the back porch. They may go, for example, along the side of a blacktop road and warm themselves. You have to be careful in the evenings when it gets cooler and they come out. I’ve treated numerous bites after people were taking wood out of a wood pile. They like wood piles, because the temperature is fairly stable and it’s easy for them to get into them. But if it gets too cold, they’re going to go and hunker down into denser areas too. If it starts getting too hot, they’ll go into cooler places. The snakes will typically prefer the 80s.
There is a temperature range that they prefer. UVA Today turned to Holstege for his expertise and advice now that snake season has returned.Ī.
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