Start the clock. After 24 hours, some 7,400 people will have been bitten by snakes, and 220 to 380 of them will die. That means 81,000 to 138,000 deaths every year. And 400,000 serious injuries such as amputations. But those are just estimates. No one knows how many…
Black mamba. Mozambique spitting cobra. Puff adder. Living in the largely rural Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) means living among these notorious snakes, the country’s main perpetrators of snakebite envenoming, WHO reports.
The WHO's strategy aimed at halving deaths and disability by 2030 from snakebites—which kill up to 138,000 people and injure 400,000 each year—is taking shape. The snakebite envenoming roadmap, which will be launched in Geneva this May, centers on delivery of up to 3…
Snakebites kill up to 138,000 people every year and some 400,000 suffer paralysis, heart failure and other effects. And while antivenom treatment—which has changed little in 123 years—can prevent death, it also can cause side-effects including anaphylactic shock.
An Epi-Pen for snakebites may be in our midst, but it will take awhile to get here. Snakebites are deadly everyday threat in rural, tropical regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America, killing around 100,000 a year and disabling some 400,000.
Up to 1.2 million snakebite envenomings and 140,000 deaths occur each year, but data is remarkably scarce on the location of the most vulnerable populations and what venomous snakes live where.
The World Health Assembly passed a resolution on snakebites last night, The Week reported, which advocates hope will improve research and access to antivenoms by the poor areas affected most deeply.
What makes snakebites—which permanently disable hundreds of thousands and kill 100,000-plus people annually—especially tragic? Highly effective antivenom treatments exist, just not for everyone. People in sub-Saharan Africa, where snakebites kill 20,000 every year, suffer…
A deadly shortage of antivenom drugs in Nigeria has left 250 dead from snakebites in the last 3 weeks, prompting health workers to call for a tighter supply chain. The last supplies of Echitab Plus ICP polyvalent and Echitab G monovalent arrived in August. The crisis is…
Several antivenoms used to help people recover from the bites of saw-scaled vipers—a group of incredibly lethal snakes commonly found in Africa, the Middle East and Asia—don’t work well enough, according to an Australian study. Snakebite antidotes contain toxins from…
