Woman's Hour - 18/11/2009

Woman's Hour with Jenni Murray. The black mamba snake is notorious for being fast, furious and deadly. Its bite is known as the kiss of death. Without treatment, the mortality rate is 100 per cent and in Swaziland, these lethal snakes turn up everywhere - in homes, schools and cars. With very limited health care and no anti-venom available, it's becoming a crisis. Jenni meets a snake handler known affectionately as 'the white witch', who removes and rescues snakes, effectively offering an emergency call out service to local people. Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks made what he called a deliberately provocative statement about why the birthrate in Europe is falling. He said Europe was in decline because its secular population was 'too selfish to have children'. With the population in the rest of the world rapidly increasing and predicted to reach nine billion by 2050, Jenni asks whether Europe really needs more people? Each year in Britain, 18,000 children are separated from their mothers by imprisonment. But a handful of women are able to keep their babies with them in special units. Woman's Hour visits the Mother and Baby Unit at Holloway Prison and the prisoners and staff working to give the children in their care the best possible start to life. Plus the continuing fascination with vampires! New Moon, the second film in the Twilight series, is about to go on general release. Based on a set of books about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire, the books have enjoyed phenomenal success - selling 85 million copies worldwide. So why have these stories been so popular with teenage girls, and even with middle-aged women?