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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 …

…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.