World Champion 'Snake Man' Killed by Cobra

Thailand's Boonreung Buachan, holder of the Guinness Book of World Records title for spending the most time penned up with snakes, was killed by a cobra that bit him during his daily show, a hospital doctor said on Monday.

Boonreung, 34 and dubbed Snake Man, was rushed unconscious to Prai Bung Hospital near his home town, 350 miles northeast of Bangkok, Dr Wipa Praituan told Reuters.

"He was brought here with no signs of life. He wasn't breathing and his heart didn't beat," she said.

Boonreung was listed by the "Guinness Book of World Records" in 1998 after living with snakes in a glass box for seven days.

An epileptic, he went into convulsions after being bitten, but no one took him to the hospital initially because they thought he was suffering an epileptic fit.

Boonreung's father said he would give his son's 30 snakes to a zoo because nobody in the family dared deal with them.

I was in Knoxville and the kid was in Washington D.C. This was before the zoo's made it mandatory that if one had a poisonous snake, the zoo must have antivenin on hand. The kids were stealing the snakes and had no idea they had stolen a Gaboon Viper. The person that called the University of Tennessee that night knew that The University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine had close ties to the Knoxville Zoo and was making a WAG as to if we had some antivenin. UTK and the Knoxville Zoo had some forethought about the poisonous snake/antivenin necessary if one were to display nasty ones. I will never ever again volunteer to take care of a mamba unless it is dead and going to necropsy. You see, the only way we got to treat these snakes is if they were sick and if they were, we had to handle them daily. Mouthrot in a poisonous snake is a real pain in the ass.

Now Knoxville has been through a case similar to this but with botulinum. A family got Botulism Type E toxicity from eating fish from a Knoxville grocery store. The UT Memorial Hospital isolated the toxin and identified it but the US has no Type E antitoxin because type E is indigenous to Europe and Africa. The USAF sent an F-104 from Knoxville to France and retrieved antitoxin and flew it back in record time. Still, 2 out of 5 died.

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