Cape Talk, Thursday morning

Producing antivenom again. So, what we did in the meantime was we imported an antivenom from India, which does cover most of our snakes, but technically doesn't cover things like Cape Cobra because the antivenom was made for Africa and not South Africa because we had our own fantastic antivenom, which is now not being produced. So, yes, it is a big problem. We don't have enough for ourselves for this year. And the South African vaccine.

Produces, it's from what I understand, a state entity. This is a result of state failure that we don't have locally produced antivenom. Yes, they are attempting to make antivenom. They did make some towards the end of last year. I think there were 3,000 vials which were then distributed. They do, at the moment, they do have Boemslang antivenom and they do have, I think, Scorpion antivenom, which are also just as dangerous, especially in the Cape.

So I'm fairly sure we've got antigenum for that, but the polyvalent, which we use for cobers, mambas, and the large adders and runco is not freely available at this stage. So we're using the imported product. But the imported product is not approved for basically ordering it over the counter. You have to fill out a request form, and it's called the Article 21. So you've got to apply that you're going to do research on this for them, and Sopra have not approved.

Approved the product for distribution in South Africa. So it becomes a big problem to actually get this and be able to use it. So we currently have a non-approved antivenom that is being, if someone is bitten by a snake. Yes. We're administering antivenom that's not officially approved. It's not officially approved for distribution, but it is approved by the

World Health Organization for use. It's actually a very, very good antivenom, but we can't, the access to it is very difficult. So, some of the larger hospital companies have gone to the trouble of filling out all the forms, and it's a long process, and which doesn't help you if someone's just been bitten. And they've got, for example, they went and bought 4,000 vials and distributed it through to their hospitals. But if I get bitten and I'm not at their hospital, I can't borrow antivenom from them like we used to have.

In the past, because they have to explain every single vial what it was used for and what the result was. Is this affecting public and private hospitals? Oh, yeah, both of them. Because the public hospitals are not, they don't have the capacity to go through all those steps to get it for some small little hospital. So, in places like KZN, they went to a lot of trouble. They had their provincial logistics department bring.