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So many misconceptions regarding snakes and reptiles in general. You're talking 1 or 2 species of monitor lizards with the Komodo dragon being #1 with the bad bacteria in its mouth killing virtually everything it bites due to it's diet. But a Komodo kept in a zoo doesn't have the same lethal bite because it doesn't eat the same diet a wild Komodo eats ..... same as the poison dart/arrow frogs. In the wild the dart frogs are deadly due to their ant diet, however, in captivity, feeding on fruit flies, they're completely harmless.
A nonvenomous snake bite is less than a hamster or a cockatiel bite. I've been bitten 100s of times by snakes that small and smaller and there was no reaction except for a little bleeding. I have a friend who has been breeding snakes for about 45 years and he's been bitten literally 1000s of times with no reactions.
Unless the snake is a giant python or boa, you've got nothing to worry about bacteria-wise. A snake's saliva has an anti-coagulation agent that will make you bleed freely for a minute or two and that's it. The next day you can't even tell where you were bitten. They have tiny little teeth that barely break the skin.
All the fear mongering over possibly getting bitten by a nonvenomous snake cracks me up. My dad used to always say that if you were bitten by any snake you'd get sick, even one they claim is nonvenomous...LOL I even showed him by letting one of my California kings bite me in front of him proving to him that I didn't get sick, I didn't die, my arm didn't swell up, etc. and he still clung to that archaic belief.....yet he kept smoking even when he knew he had lung cancer.....Me, I'm more afraid of the second hand smoke than ANY snake in the world.
My father taught me that when I was about 10 and came running to the house saying there was a cobra in the pasture. It was actually a black snake, but it was reared up and waving back and forth, just like the cobra in Johny Quest.
