I’ve always heard that if you get bitten by a kimodo dragon, you’ll die because his saliva is so infested with bacteria that it might as well be poison.

But this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it actually happening…. Link to original piece, via the Fortean Times.

“Mansur, an eight- (or nine-) year-old boy, was mauled to death by a Komodo dragon in east­ern Indo­ne­sia on 2 June. He was with his uncle mending fish­ing nets (or reliev­ing him­self in a bush) on Komodo Island â?? one of the larg­est in the Komodo nat­ional park â?? when the dragon att­acked him. It clawed his right leg, bit him in the stom­ach with its serr­ated teeth and shook him in an att­empt to break his neck. His uncle and other men pelted the creat­ure with rocks until it re­leased the boy, who was uncons­cious and bleed­ing heav­ily. Before a boat could be arr­anged to take him to a doctor, he had died of his injur­ies. Even if he had sur­vived the init­ial attack, say experts, he would have been killed by blood pois­on­ing from the bact­eria in the drag­onâ??s saliva.”

This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2007.