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Poisonous viper bites six-year-old in Austria

A seven year old boy was rushed to hospital on Thursday after being bitten by a poisonous snake in Austria.

Poisonous viper bites six-year-old in Austria
Common European viper. Photo: Benny Trapp/Wikimedia

The boy had been in a meadow in Albeck in Carinthia when he was bitten by the venomous Common European viper, found around western Europe and Asia. He was quickly flown to Klinikum Klagenfurt hospital where he was given the antidote.

The venom of the common viper is up to three times as poisonous as the diamondback rattlesnake but only a little amount of venom is released in a bite, meaning it is only dangerous for children and older people.

Generally, the common viper is not aggressive and usually bites only when alarmed or disturbed.

Snake bites man in Vienna

It was not the only snake bite incident in Austria this week.

In what was a slightly more unusual incident, a 35-year-old man was bitten by a snake on a street in Vienna on Sunday.

The man had spotted the snake on the street and had tried to put it in a bag so he could take it away safely when it attacked him.

“It became aggressive and bit me twice on the hand,” he told Heute. “A passer-by thought that it was perhaps a harmless Aesculapian snake.”

After calling police, the man's lightly-injured hand was disinfected by officers who took the snake away to free it in the wild.