Public health threats vary from country to country, and this is true for vector-borne health threats as well. For example, mosquitoes are one of the leading causes of death in Africa and wasps are major killers in Asian countries. Here in America, ticks are the arthropods to fear, as thirty thousand people per year fall ill as a result of contracting lyme disease. While many people may assume that disease-spreading arachnids, like ticks, are a rarity, scorpions are considered a major public health threat in tropical and subtropical regions all over the world, including the United States. This is not surprising, as scorpions have a wide distribution across the globe.
The rate of medical incidents involving scorpions differs from country to country and depends on numerous factors such as socioeconomic status, residential status, availability of health services, and the geographical distribution of species. Scorpions pose the greatest threat to public health in African, Middle Eastern, and Central American countries. Scorpions are by no means rare in the US, and the arachnids cause the greatest amount of medical incidents and deaths in Mexico, which is alarmingly close to America. Every year, 300,000 scorpion stings are reported in Mexico, and many of these cases turn out to be fatalities. Back in 1995, 7000 scorpion stings were recorded in Brazil, and despite having anti-venom in abundance, 1 percent of these stings resulted in death. Both Morocco and Tunisia report 40,000 scorpion related medical incidents each year. India is currently home to a staggering 86 percent of all scorpion species known to exist. Scorpion stings in children result in death 3-22 percent of the time. When taking the entire world into account, 1.2 million scorpion stings are reported annually, and of these cases, 3,250 deaths result. This means that for every person killed by a snake bite, ten are killed by a scorpion sting.
If you sustained a scorpion bite would you visit the hospital even if you did not immediately develop symptoms?
