- Joined
- Nov 7, 2003
- Messages
- 492
I agree with Fusion on this. I would never use antivenin on myself for a scorpion sting. First, it's too expensive to buy and keep. It has a short shelf life and needs to be replaced frequently, so even if you never use it, you still have to keep buying it. It also must be refrigerated at all times. It is essentially horse plasma (blood with the cells removed), so it will go bad very quickly if allowed to warm. This brings up the dangers of using it. If it has not been manufactured, processed, transported, and stored properly, you'd be injecting yourself with rotten or contaminated horse blood. Think about how badly that could hurt you. Even if it is good, injecting yourself with the blood of another animal has the potential for causing disease, and presents a large risk of anaphylactic shock, which is much more likely to kill you than a scorpion sting. Even if you had epipens handy, anaphylaxis could easily kill you faster than you could get help. Antivenin can also cause damage to your internal organs after the fact as your body tries to get rid of the horse proteins. On top of all the costs and risks, there's no reason to take it in the first place. Antivenin should be the last-ditch method of treating a serious life-threatening envenomation. A scorpion sting isn't like a bite from a venomous snake. With snakes you're usually dealing with a large dose of powerful neurotoxin that has the ability to drop you very quickly, or a hemolytic toxin that will rapidly digest and destroy your tissues. In both cases, antivenin is a lesser risk than the venom, and may be the only way to save limbs and lives. A scorpion sting is almost never going to be life-threatening, and even if it is, the victim will have plenty of time to seek medical attention. You would not be racing a clock to get to a hospital, and doctors could almost certainly treat the sting effectively without antivenin (as long as they know what to do and what not to do, which is why you should keep that information handy, as Dave brought up in another thread a couple of weeks ago). So, the costs and risks of using antivenin for a scorpion sting are substantial, while the benefits are minor at best.