PAPUA NEW GUINEA SNAKEBITE PROJECT
A VIP VISITOR

David was due back today, with visitors again but this time he was bringing Christine Wright, the Co-Director of AVRU*. She was in Port Moresby in a whistle-stop visit to remove all the labels from the antivenoms and replace them with code-numbers so that the antivenom trial, comparing our new Costa Rican Monospecific Taipan Antivenom with the existing CSL antivenom, could begin. She did that on Monday so all Dave needs now are some snakebite victims - and they should not be long in coming.

*AVRU - Australian Venom Research Unit, Dept of Pharmacology, University of Melbourne, the unit behind the snakebite research and new antivenom trials in PNG.

With one day free before her flight back to Australia, Dave thought she might enjoy a visit to our field station to see Papuan snakes (although we have no venomous snakes on site at present).

While all this was going on Ben and Jasper were in the field, up a small mountain looking for death adders. I was completing a series of head-scalation photographs of the snakes capured so far and then I went out, checked the drift fence and climbed the mountain opposite the campsite with the same aim in mind, but neither party found any snakes.

The village and our cmapsite from the mountain across the river click on the image for a close-up Green = the campsite tarpaulin Blue = the tarpaulin of the house visible on Google Earth (the other two houses were not built when the GE image was taken)

When I came down I headed towards Edevu to meet the incoming Troopie and hitched a ride back on it.

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