New Discovery About Scorpion Stings Could Lead to New Ways to Treat Them
According to Popular Science scorpion stings kill about 3,000 people per year, but new research recently published in Nature Communications examines how the toxins scorpion venom contain affect the body on the molecular level, which could potentially lead to a new form of treatment.
While anti-venom can often times stop the toxins from taking their full effect, these same measures can also cause allergic reactions in the victims, putting their lives further at risk. Researchers had suspected that inflammation was to blame for the intense reactions some scorpion venoms ellicit, so they tested this theory by giving different doeses of scorpion venom to groups of mice and observed the diffrent systems that reacted. Even small amounts of venom lead to an inflammatory response, and two particular compounds came in waves to signal the start and end of the inflammatory response. It was this inflammation that was causing the mice’s lungs to swell, ultimately killing them. When a drug was given to the mice that limited inflammation, the mice were able to survive. This indicates, the researchers argue, that anti-inflammatory drugs could be a potential way to prevent vemon-related deaths.
