When a Nigerian woman died at a hospital door after being bitten by a cobra, her death became a viral story of healthcare failure. But the tragedy exposes something larger and more insidious: pharmaceutical colonialism is still killing Africans in 2026.
The woman, bitten by a cobra in Nigeria's capital region, went to three hospitals before finding antivenom. By the time treatment arrived, it was too late. She died during transfer to intensive care. Social media erupted with familiar narratives about Nigerian healthcare collapse.
But this wasn't incompetence. This was scarcity by design.
The Pharmaceutical Withdrawal
In 2015, Sanofi, the French pharmaceutical giant, quietly stopped producing Fav-Afrique, the primary antivenom for sub-Saharan Africa. The reason? Not profitable enough. The company estimated it would cost €15 million to upgrade manufacturing facilities. For a corporation with €37 billion in annual revenue, that was apparently too much to save thousands of African lives.
Today, only three antivenoms exist for the entire sub-Saharan region: Echitab (for one snake species), Echitab Plus (polyvalent, likely used in the Nigerian case), and South African Polyvalent. All are produced in limited quantities. None are made by major pharmaceutical companies.
"At the moment there is a scarcity of antivenom in the subsaharan African region," a Nigerian doctor explained in a detailed Reddit post analyzing the woman's death. "Sanofi, the pharmaceutical company, was responsible once upon a time for making snake antivenom for Africa. It stopped a very long time ago because it sadly was not profitable."
A Continental Crisis
Snakebites kill an estimated 20,000 to 32,000 people across Africa annually, with Nigeria bearing one of the highest burdens. The victims are overwhelmingly rural farmers, herders, and their children—people already marginalized by geography and poverty.
Even when antivenom exists, it doesn't reach them. Hospitals in major cities like Abuja run out. Referrals mean frantic drives between facilities, burning precious time as neurotoxic venom attacks the nervous system and heart. Tourniquets—outdated first aid that can cause amputation—are still common because people don't know better.
Plateau State, with Nigeria's highest snakebite rate, maintains better antivenom stocks than the capital. But for a woman bitten by a cobra near Abuja, that knowledge came too late.
African Solutions Emerge
What Sanofi abandoned, Africans are now building themselves.
In August 2024, three firms signed an MOU to produce antivenom locally in Nigeria: AMA Medical Manufacturing Company, Echitab Study Group Nigeria, and UK-based Micropharm Ltd. The collaboration promises to end Nigeria's reliance on importing live snakes to Liverpool for venom extraction, then importing the finished antivenom back at prohibitive cost.
"This is the beginning of self-sufficiency for the product not only in the country, but the entire continent," said Prof. Nasidi Abdulsalami, chairman of AMA Medical.
Ghana and Eswatini have launched similar initiatives. The World Health Organization has endorsed the Nigerian formulation as superior to existing global options.
Yet these efforts came after Sanofi's exit, after thousands of preventable deaths, after it became clear that African lives would not be saved by Western pharmaceutical benevolence.
Why Readers Should Care
This is not a story about "African healthcare gaps." This is about how global pharmaceutical markets are structured to serve rich countries while abandoning poor ones—even when the technology exists, even when the need is desperate, even when the math is simple: €15 million to save tens of thousands of lives annually.
The Nigerian woman's death was mourned online as one more tragedy in a broken system. But she died because a French corporation decided African snake venom victims weren't worth the investment. She died because for decades, no one in Geneva or Paris or Washington treated snakebites as a crisis worth solving.
Now Africans are solving it themselves—not because they wanted to reinvent the wheel, but because they were left with no choice.
Dr. Nandul Durfa of Echitab noted that efforts to produce antivenom locally began with funding approved by former President Obasanjo in 2006. That money never materialized. Two decades and countless deaths later, the continent is finally claiming pharmaceutical sovereignty.
But one must ask: how many more women will die at hospital doors before that sovereignty is realized?
54 countries, 2,000 languages, 1.4 billion people. And still, in 2026, they are told their lives aren't profitable enough to save.
