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The treatment is called Fav-Afrique. It’s the only anti-venom approved to neutralize the bites of 10 deadly African snakes, like spitting cobras, carpet vipers and black mambas. And the world’s stockpiles of it are dwindling, Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday. The last batch expires next June.
“I think this is really a health crisis,” says Dr. Gabriel Alcoba, the snakebite medical adviser for Doctors Without Borders. “We’re talking about more than 30,000 deaths per year. This is an epidemic. This is comparable to many other diseases.”
The World Is Running Out Of A Critical Snakebite Antidote
Photo: Balint Porneczi/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Caption: Black mambas are one of the fastest snakes in the world and grow up to 14 feet long. But their venom is no match for the antidote Fav-Afrique.
The World Health Organization cites “a recent study estimates that at least 421,000 envenomings and 20,000 deaths occur worldwide from snakebite each year, but warns that these figures may be as high as 1,841,000 envenomings and 94,000 deaths. The highest burden of snakebites is in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.
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Envenoming following snakebite, is largely a neglected threat to public health. It affects mainly the poor in deprived rural areas where health facilities and are limited and anti-venoms may be hard to obtain. Training of health staff in the management of envenoming is often neglected, despite good evidence that it improves outcome. Concerted action is needed to ensure supplies of effective antivenoms and to develop systems that deliver good quality health care to snake bite victims so that we can deal effectively with this problem, which causes severe disability, brings misery to families and which kills thousands of people.
(Source: WHO-Neglected Tropical Diseases - Snakebite)
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