Optimistic Paranoid
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2013
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<p>I caught a recent news report about a Maryland woman who was bitten by a copperhead in a DC park. She needed three vials of snake anti-vennin.</p><p>The bill was $55,000 dollars. If she had had health insurance, her co-pay would have been only a few hundred dollars, but her health insurance had lapsed a few weeks ago.</p><p>Back in June, there was a report about an 11 year old Florida boy who was bitten by an Eastern Diamondback Rattler. He needed 80 vials of anti-vennin. Total cost of treatment - 1.6 million dollars.</p><p>There is only one supplier of snake anti-vennin, and they charge the hospitals $2,200 a vial. But the hospitals charge 10 TIMES THAT!!!</p><p>This has prompted me to do a little more research on snakebites, snakebite kits, etc.</p><p>It turns out that all of those Boy Scout kits, Sawyer Extractors, etc. are useless, and probably do more damage than they help. Anti-vennin is the only treatment medically proven to work.</p><p>Here in North America, there are only four kinds of poisonous snakes:</p><p>Cottonmouths, Copperheads, Rattlesnakes, and Coral snakes.</p><p>Cottonmouths, Copperheads, and Ratlesnakes are all pit vipers, and the same ant-vennin is used to treat all of them.</p><p>Coral snakes are NOT, and require a different anti-vennin. BUT, so few people get bitten by coral snakes, that the sole producer of coral snake anti-vennin was LOSING MONEY making it, so they shut the product line down. Existing stocks are now all used up.</p><p>Read the Wikipedia articles on Snake Bite Treatments and Coral Snakes. For more on the news stories I mentioned in the beginning, google News Snake Bite Costs.</p><p>(BTW, while we have 4 types of poisonous snakes here, Australia has nearly 50, and the deadliest North American snake, the coral snake, wouldn't even make it into Australia's Top 20!)<br><br>Regards<br>John</p>