Your Next Nightmare: Venomous Snake Bites People in Their Sleep

By By Agata Blaszczak-Boxe, Staff WriterApril 26, 2014 8:35 AM

Unlike most venomous snakes, which tend to bite people who are either handling them or who surprise them, the large Australian mulga snake has also been found to attack people who are asleep.

In a new study that examined 27 cases of people bitten by the mulga snake, researchers found that seven of the victims were asleep when they were bitten, between midnight and 5 a.m.

Such bites were not common — most of the people in the study who were bitten had intentionally made contact with a snake. For instance, one victim was bitten while playing with a snake in the garden, and another was bitten while feeding a pet snake. 

But 10 people who were bitten had encountered a mulga snake unintentionally, and the fact that seven of these victims were bitten while sleeping "is noteworthy since it represents 70 percent of identified cases involving bites without intentional contact, and suggests that bites sustained during sleep may be more common than previously reported," the researchers wrote in their report.

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