Girl, 4, stops breathing after being bitten twice by deadly snake
A desperate rescue mission was sparked after a four-year-old Perth girl was bitten twice by a deadly snake and stopped breathing.
The brown snake struck Emilia Barnard in the sand dunes on the first day of a family holiday to Coral Bay, in Western Australia.
“I saw something slither,” Emilia recalled.
Her parents were just a few steps behind when their four-year-old started screaming.
“We just picked her up and ran,” Emilia’s mother Kari recalled.
Kari and David took their little girl to the Coral Bay nursing station.
Nurses worked to keep Emilia alive under the direction of a doctor who dialled in via Telelink from Perth.
“She could have died. She was close to being dead,” Doctor Peter Lehman, from Emergency Telehealth Service told 7 News.
The anti-venom needed to save the four-year-old was a three hour flight away.
But she had professional help and a lot of love on her side.
When The Royal Flying Doctors Service arrived there was more trouble, as they raced against a huge sandstorm that would close the airstrip.
Eventually Emilia was on the plane, but David had no idea if his daughter was still alive.
“It only fits one parent in the plane and I didn’t know whether I wasn’t going to see them again, or her again,” he said.
About 295 people were treated for snake bites in WA hospitals last year. There’s already been another 151 snake bite cases this year.
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Stocks of anti-venom are kept at almost fifty locations across country WA. Coral bay isn’t one of them despite there being six or seven snake bites there every year.
Fortunately Emilia has bounced back from her ordeal.
