Question: how many people would you save if you cured a venom (roughly)???

Adam Hargreaves answered on 15 Jun 2017:

Hi Andy_B,
That’s an interesting question, and the answer is probably a bit vague.
At the minute we don’t have a really good idea of how many people are bitten each year or how many people die from snakebite per year (this is called epidemiological data). This is because a lot of bites happen in very remote places, and not everything gets recorded. Having said that, one study from about 10 years ago went through all the data available and the estimate is that about 94,000 people die each year from snakebite. This is more then a lot of tropical diseases combined.
If you were to make an antivenom for one venom it would really depend on what snake it was for. For example, the inland Taipan snake in Australia is the most venomous snake in the world, but it has never killed anyone. This is because it lives in the middle of Australia where no humans live!
Really what’s needed is an antivenom which works against a few species for a particular region (these are called polyvalent antivenoms, ones which only work on one species are called monovalent). This is because you would only need one treatment for an area, and because sometimes people can’t identify the snake that has bitten them. If you were to create a magic antivenom that worked against everything, I imagine the number of people could be well above the 94,000 number.