Our report, while giving a broad overview of envenoming trends in Australia, does raise more questions than it answers. Sure Australia also has sharks and crocodiles, but it’s important to note that the majority of our critters do not come after you. The continent of America has a menagerie of reptilian assassins such as vipers, and its mammals also pack a punch, with reports of attacks from bears, wolves and mountain lions.Ī sturdy Australian would surely quake at the thought of being faced with an offensive grizzly, with no amount of Crocodile Dundee-esk buffalo hypnotism techniques going to get us through that encounter. In the United Kingdom there are reports of deaths or injuries from bees, widow spiders, jellyfish and adder snakes. As you can see from the figures, though, they don’t kill as many people as you might think and other countries have their own potentially deadly creatures. Understandably, living in a country with creatures that can potentially kill us is a daunting prospect. Nevertheless, snake bites do hold the crown as the most common cause of death, with nearly twice as many deaths per hospital admission than any other venomous injury, making snakebite one of the most important issues to address. In the same time frame, for example, figures from the National Coronial Information System ( NCIS) show nearly 5,000 people died from drowning and 1,000 from burns in Australia. While it’s natural to be frightened of snakes, the reality is the number of deaths from snake bites in Australia is very small.
The red belly black snake is not as nasty as it looks.
To put that in perspective, the World Health Organization estimates that at least 100,000 people die from snake bite globally each year. Given there are 140 species of land snakes in Australia, snake bite fatalities are very rare, at 27 for the study period.
Anaphylaxis to tick and ant bites combined caused five deaths, the box jellyfish caused three deaths and two deaths were from an unidentified insect. Of these, 27 deaths were the result of a bee or wasp sting, with only one case of a beekeeper being killed. Over the 12 years, 64 people were killed by a venomous sting or bite, with more than half of these (34) caused by an allergic reaction to an insect bite that brought on anaphylactic shock. This can be loosely averaged 0.01% of the Australian population per year, or roughly one in 10,000 Australians.Īllergy or anaphylaxis from insect stings such as bees or wasps were responsible for about one-third (33%) of hospital admissions, followed by spider bites (30%) and snake bites (15%). Over the 12 years that’s an average 3,500 people admitted to hospital every year for a venom-related injury. Most – not all – are shown in the graph, below. We sourced data from 2001-2013 from national hospital admissions and national coronial information, which showed more than 42,000 hospitalisations from venomous sting or bites. My colleagues and I recently published a review of hospital admissions and deaths caused by venomous animals in the Internal Medical Journal. But is this reputation of a land of deadly and aggressive creatures well founded? Detail in the data