Citation

Sheth S, Wang B. Lancet 2024; 403(10446): 2782-2783.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00884-5

PMID

38944520

Abstract

The Taluka of Mahad and its surrounding village areas, in the Konkan region in India, is home to one of the most poisonous red scorpions (Mesobuthus tamulus) in the world. During the 1980s, if a person was stung by a scorpion in a rural village, they would not survive the night. At this time, most people living in villages of India had no cure for poisonous scorpion stings and died without proper treatments; no proper medication was available and the medical knowledge of doctors was insufficient to address scorpion sting victims. This norm was broken by a village-born physician named Dr Himmatrao Bawaskar.1
Dr Bawaskar not only invented a treatment for scorpion sting envenomation,2
, 3
but also took rigorous initiative to travel across rural India to educate and motivate doctors to treat scorpion sting victims. His treatment approaches reduced the fatality rate from 40% in the 1970s to 1% in 2014.4
However, India still has an absence of proper medical treatment infrastructure in villages and substantial improvements are required to facilitate treatment for every individual.5
In addition, reductions to treatment cost and convenient, faster ways to reach medical facilities are necessary. The initiative of providing free medical insurance to those in poverty might help to reduce financial burden, but it is likely to have a near negligible effect on scorpion sting envenomation treatment. Therefore, scorpion sting envenomation is still far from reaching a proper medical status, which is required to...

Language: en

Keywords

Humans; Animals; India/epidemiology; *Scorpion Stings/mortality; Scorpions