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Representational image. | Biswarup Ganguly/Wikimedia Commons India accounts for the highest number of snakebite cases and deaths in the world. A snakebite can kill, and survivors can be disabled. Yet, publicly available government data for snakebites are patchy – different data sets giving widely different numbers. There is also a class dimension to who is worst affected by snakebites: most victims live in rural, forested or agricultural areas, as snakes live and move more freely there. “There is no single registry for this data,” said Deepti Beri, a researcher at the India office of the George Institute for Global Health, Australia. “It exists with the government and with the police and is collected by hospitals. This has created different data on snakebites across data sets.” Beri has been studying snakebite data in India and has found big differences in how data are recorded and that the numbers vary across data sets. ....