A deserted island where the forest floor writhes with the world's most venomous vipers. A fisherman found dead on his boat, its deck awash with his blood. A lighthouse keeper and his family massacred in a nocturnal snake invasion of their isolated cottage home. What sounds like the script from some tacky, low-budget horror flick may be as much fact as fiction. What's more, these tales have a purpose that goes beyond fireside entertainment. Chilling …showed first 75 words of 500 total…

…showed last 75 words of 500 total…to death, especially if they attempt that old "remedy" of cutting the bite to suck out the poison. One embarrassed bite victim I met, 24-year-old woodcutter Jisto Dutra do Sousa, was caught out by a fer-de-lance coiled in his woodstacks and spent almost two weeks recovering in hospital. "It's the first time I've been bitten, and what I remember most about it is the incredible pain. It was immediate," he recalled from his hospital bed.