Experts call for snakebite to be re-established as a neglected tropical disease

Deaths and disabilities associated with snakebites are more than twice the estimated numbers provided by international organisations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), experts have said.

Speaking at the 18th World Congress of the International Society on Toxinology in Oxford on 25-30 September, they called on WHO and governments to re-establish snakebite as a neglected tropical disease. They also warned that stocks of antivenom were “running dangerously low” in some countries and that the quality and quantity of antivenom stocks in rural areas, where they were most needed, was reaching crisis point.

In September the international medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières called on health workers, …