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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Snakebites kill 100,000 people every year, here's what you should know, published by MathiasKB on April 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. WHO estimates between 81,000-138,000 die every year from venomous snakebites. What on earth!? When I first heard this I refused to believe it. How had I managed to call myself an EA for so many years and not known snakebites were this big a deal? Not only do snakebites kill an unfathomable number of people, another four hundred thousand are permanently disabled every year. In this post I will: Provide an overview of the situation. Look at the cost-effectiveness of conventional interventions to prevent and treat envenoming. Argue that a new medical invention could make a massive difference and shill for the company that invented it. Why do snakebites kill and maim so many? Imagine you're a farmer working in the amazon. One day, as you are working your field, you suddenly feel a searing pain from your leg. You see a snake dislodging its fangs from your calf and quickly slither away. Was it venomous or not? Even if it were a venomous snake that bit you, there's a 50% chance it was a dry-bite, and that the swelling will go away after a while. The trip to the nearest medical facility will take an entire day and cost you a fortune. You decide to wait and see. After a while the symptoms get worse and you decide to consult your family. They tell you to go to the town's spiritual healer, who can treat you for a much smaller cost. When morning comes around, you finally make the decision to go to the hospital. It's now too late. By the time you arrive the venom will have done its damage. Even if you receive the correct antivenom treatment and survive, you will suffer permanent disability and be in for a long and expensive hospital stay. After a few weeks spent recovering in the hospital you will find yourself handicapped, out of work, and in debt. Snakebite envenoming is an enormous burden on tropical regions in the third and second world. Like other neglected tropical diseases, the burden of snakebites is much larger than the just deaths they cause. Having a productive member of one's family or community suddenly die or become permanently disabled wrecks havoc on all those who were dependent on them. Children, for example, are often removed from schools to make up for the lost income and additional person who must now be taken care of. After reading up on various studies, WHO reports, and meeting with the CEO of a venom diagnostics startup, I believe there are two primary reasons why snakebites do so much harm. Snakebites are expensive to treat Treating envenoming requires administering antivenom which is expensive to produce. Each type of venomous snake species requires its own antivenom. Administering the wrong antivenom is costly and harms the patient. The hospitalization and antivenom treatment is far too expensive for many to afford. In Bangladesh, nearly 75% of snakebite victims spent their savings on treatment and over 60% had to borrow to meet the costs. The world currently produces roughly half the antivenom needed to treat every patient. WHO argues (without using these exact terms) that there is a lemons-market for antivenom, where production of low-grade and ineffective antivenom is crowding out high-quality producers. This has reduced the profitability of antivenom production and prevents producers from scaling up production. For example, FAV Afrique, a dependable and widely distributed antivenom in sub-saharan Africa, was discontinued in 2016. I haven't been able to verify that recent discontinuations of antivenom production can be attributed to a lemon market, and an alternative explanation could be that WHO is neglecting that a worse treatment for less money may be the better outcome for some. Lemons-market or not, we ...