Is the snake that just bit you deadly? Venom ‘pregnancy test’ could tell

Cecilie Knudsen placed the urine on one end of the strip, then sat anxiously for 15 minutes to see whether one or two lines appeared. She wasn’t testing for pregnancy. Instead, Knudsen, a biotechnologist and co-founder of VenomAid Diagnostics, was waiting to see whether the test she and her colleagues developed would accurately detect the presence of a particular snake venom in a sample of mouse urine. It did . The finding, published last month in Scientific Reports , represents “a really remarkable step in venom diagnosis,” says Kalana Maduwage, a physician and biochemist at the University of New England in Australia who has been working on similar diagnostic tools . Snakebites kill some 100,000 people every year and disable hundreds of thousands more. The numbers could be reduced if doctors were able to administer antivenom more quickly and accurately. But only one test is available, and it doesn’t work in the regions where snakebites take the greatest toll. Can researchers develop something simpler and faster—a “pregnancy test” for snakebites, as it were—for the places that need it most? Here’s what we know. Every second counts Not every snakebite needs to be treated with antivenom. Most of the world’s snakes are not deadly, and even those that are don’t always inject venom when they bite. Administering antivenom in such cases means risking potentially severe side effects and wasting the rare, expe...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news