Woman rescued from coils of giant python after struggling for two hours

A 64-year-old woman has been rescued from the tightening clutches of a massive python after her neighbours were alerted to her whimpers.

The hospital maid was washing dishes at the back of her home on the outskirts of Bangkok when the four-metre-long snake attacked on Tuesday evening.

The woman, named as Arom by local media, was unable to break free from the massive python – estimated to weigh at least 20kg – after it bit her legs, pushed her to the ground, and wrapped itself around her waist.

A neighbour called the police and the Poh Teck Tung Foundation, a rescue service, after they heard the woman’s calls for help. After forcing their way into the house, it took the team more than half an hour to free Arom – who by this point was barely conscious.

“I have never encountered an event like this in my life,” Arom, a hospital maid, told The Nation, which published photos of her right thigh covered in snake bites. The woman is recovering in hospital, while the snake escaped into the reeds behind her home.

Videos of the scene show the rescuers arriving with torches and finding Arom trapped on the floor. It is not clear how she was freed exactly, but pythons can be removed by carefully unwinding them from tail to head.

Pythons are not venomous, but wounds can become infected. Instead, the reptiles are constrictor snakes, which kill their prey by gradually squeezing away their breath, before unhinging their jaws to swallow them whole.

Thailand is home to several python species – including the reticulated python, the world’s longest snake – and locals are no strangers to attacks. Several years ago a python was filmed regurgitating a pet dog in the country’s south, while up to 80 per cent of calls to emergency hotlines in Bangkok relate to python sightings.

The country is also home to more than 40 venomous species, from cobras to the Malayan pit viper, and the capital hosts one of the region’s largest anti-venom production “farms”. Across Asia, roughly 242,600 people are bitten and 15,900 die from snake bites every year.

Snake bite is considered a neglected issue worldwide, in part because anti-venoms are expensive, laborious to produce, and can often trigger serious allergic reactions. There is now a major push to improve these treatments, or even develop a universal antivenom.