James Fair takes a look at the contenders for Africa’s most dangerous animal
Well, the most dangerous animal in Africa is not the hippo, as many a pub bore will claim.
Research carried out by experts Craig Packer and Dennis Ikanda found that lions were responsible for more than 563 deaths in Tanzania between 1990 and 2005, and that 60 per cent of all animal attacks in the south-east of the country were carried out by lions (compared with 4.6 per cent by hippos).
But this ratio won’t be true for the rest of Africa because Tanzania has more lions than any other country. Between 3,529 and 32,117 deaths in Africa each year can be attributed to snake bites, and, according to Dr Robert Harrison of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, two species can be singled out as the most dangerous: the saw-scaled viper Echis ocellatus (the deadliest snake in the world which is responsible for 80 per cent of all bites in West Africa) and the puff adder Bitis arietans.
Lions and snakes aside, the Anopheles mosquito transmits malaria, which kills between 530,000 and 1.12m people in Africa every year, so it is the greatest killer of all and therefore the most dangerous animal in Africa. We named the mosquito the deadliest insect in the world
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