Ha! I've seen some pretty big copperheads killed in West by God.

Ah, good old fashioned traditional medicine

"This stuff seems nasty and/or toxic; I bet it cures stuff!"

I guess rubbing dirt on it, and manning up was not an option?

That seems to be ridiculously high priced.

I'm talking about the guy who says he was denied antivenin without species confirmation (can't help but wonder if it was more a "these guys surely can't pay for this shit" type policy in reality) and suffered severe complications

No it doesn't, GD keeps telling you to kill it with fire and/or nuke it from orbit

A few years ago we had our dog bitten by a snake and we had to go to the local hospital to pick up the anti Venom and bring it back to the veterinarian, it cost $1,000.

I picked this guy up one night when I picked a sprinkler up to move it. Luckily for me it evidently scared him as bad as it did me and all he wanted to get away and it didn't take me long at all to let loose of him. For a copperhead he was pretty good size.

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They should have put .99 at the end of each price.  It psychologically makes the consumer think they're getting a better deal.

If only they sold supplemental insurance to protect against cougar attacks.  

And this - this - is why we need Magpul D60s.

Cool

What kind of an asshole gets bitten by one of those damn things?  

HUGE fangs!

4-6 vials initially moderate envenomation
8-12 vials initially fore severe envenomation

2 vials every 6 hours for 3 doses after loading dose above

My top rattlesnake count is nine in one afternoon hike in the desert.

In real life. 6 vials for everyone. See what happens. Saves on cost compared to giving 12 up front. If it continues to progress give another 6. Once no progression switch to maintenance dosing 2 vials every 6.

Anavip is even better - nearly every hospital here in AZ where we see quite a few bites has switched to it - cheaper and no redosing.

Because they can.

Yep... mom passed away 01/2019

Just last month my dad got a bill for almost 5k from the hospital out of the blue after an 'adjustment.'  Insurance is saying they won't cover it because of the time gap.

On top of being obscenely expensive the medical industry also gets away with shit like this, that no other industry could dream of pulling off, because reasons.

I’m a member of what I thought was a crazy group on Facebook: “Self-Immunization with Snake Venoms”

It’s been a couple of years, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t convinced by their evidence. It’s a crazy world.

Are you familiar with Bill Haast?

now that's how you do it!

I got curious as to why it was so expensive... holy shit!

The crazy reason it costs $14,000 to treat a snakebite with $14 medicine



Every once in awhile somebody will go and get themselves bitten by a venomous snake, and come home with an outrageous hospital bill that makes headlines.

Nobody expects antivenom to be cheap. Making the most common rattlesnake antivenom, for instance, involves injecting sheep with snake venom and then harvesting the antibodies produced by the animals' immune systems. But does that process, complicated as it may be, add up to the estimated $2,300 per vial hospitals pay for the stuff?

Leslie Boyer wanted to find out. She's the founding director of the VIPER Institute at the University of Arizona, a research group studying ways to improve the medical treatment of venom injuries. VIPER was instrumental in the development of CroFab, the leading rattlesnake antivenom, as well as its upcoming competitor Anavip.

Boyer knows more than just about anyone about how antivenoms work, and how to study them in the lab. But she couldn't figure out why the price was so high. So, as she writes in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Medicine, she requested "cost data from factory supervisors, sales representatives, animal managers, hospital administrators, health care finance officers, hospital pharmacists, grants managers and insurance specialists representing over 20 organizations involved in antivenom work affecting Latin America and the USA." She and her colleagues at VIPER used the numbers to build a pricing model for a typical arachnid antivenom sold in the United States. Here's how that model breaks down:

Shockingly, the cost of actually making the antivenom — of R&D, animal care, plasma harvesting, bottling, and the like — added up to roughly one tenth of one percent of the total cost. Clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of the antivenom accounted for another 2 percent. Other miscellaneous costs, including licensing fees, wholesaler fees, regulatory, legal and office costs, and profit to medical providers, added up to 28 percent.

Finally, over 70 percent of the cost — responsible for most of the "sticker shock" you see in so many stories about envenomation care — comes from hospital markups that are used as instruments in negotiation with insurance providers. Depending on the hospital and the insurer, some percentage of this amount later gets discounted during the final payment process.

"It's a markup intended to be discounted back down," Boyer explained in an interview. But if you don't have insurance? The negotiating is all on you. And if you happen to have a high deductible for medications, you have to cough up the deductible amount, which can add up to thousands of dollars.

Setting aside the huge hospital markups, Boyer says there's a lot going on the the "other" cost category as well. "The lion’s share of expected payment on behalf of insured patients was attributable to analysts, attorneys, consultants and business activities that set the U.S. bureaucracy apart from its neighbors," she writes in the Journal of American Medicine.

Perversely, in this field competition can sometimes drive up the cost of medication. She points to the fight between rival rattlesnake antivenoms currently winding down before the International Trade Commission. "Rather than bringing the price of antivenom down, competition drove it up, as millions of dollars in legal costs had to be distributed across a few thousand patients," she writes.

"My clinical trials can only benefit future patients if they can afford the drugs," Boyer said. "The U.S. needs to rethink how we manage these things, because we have reached the point where the developing world is getting more timely access to better drugs (at least in this field) than we are."

According to Boyer's model, a single vial of antivenom that would cost more than $14,000 in the United States would cost $100 to $200 in Mexico. Same medicine. Same manufacturer. But a totally different pharmaceutical market.

In Mexico, Boyer says, authorities determined some time ago that treating venomous snake and spider bites was a public health issue. "Their policy has always been that the government will provide adequate amounts of antivenom via a massive purchase of the drug which it distributes to health clinics." We could try to implement something similar here, but it would require an act of Congress to do so.

Boyer calls antivenom troubles the "tip of the iceberg." She goes on: "It sounds esoteric. It's something that happens to so few people. But the truth is the entire American system for developing, testing, licensing and paying for drugs is broken. Things like this go on every day with every drug but in a smaller way, and it adds up."

Yep. The guy that started and runs that group - Norman Benoit - ran with Haast back in the day.

I saw a TV show about this guy’s blood being used for research purposes.

You can tell me the sky is blue and water is wet and neither of those would as true as this...

I'm picturing a Predator-style screaming magdump into your shrubs, in pursuit of a garter snake.

Rent-seeking.  An orgy of rent-seeking.

What do you do for the ones dropping out of the trees?

I nearly run a Copperhead over at least once a week on my bike ride through the trails.  Is there any value in catching them and getting them to someone who makes the antivenom?  It's quite the panic scene when the local housewives walk down the trail and step on one.

Friend got hit by a Pygmy Rattler.

Both hands, arm.
ICU for a week. 18? Shots if I remember correctly.

What the shit was he doing to get bit like that?

Cuddling

Trying to let go

We had a VFD that would hold a rattle snake round up every year as a fund raiser.   They would do those sacking contests with rattle snakes.
They only time I ever went I saw two guys get bite.  One year they sent 6 different fools to the hospital and they ran out of anti-venom and had to fly that shit in.


Normally they stock pile before the weekend because they know they are going to need a bunch but someone dropped the ball that year.


8nBAIT

I don't feel so bad about my own incident now.

Glad shes ok OP. You need more of this.

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I lived near Morgantown and saw copperheads every summer.

I have two friends that had 4 bites a between them. One of them got 3 of the 4 and those were spaced out by about 4 years. The last 2 were with one on each leg by different snakes.

All copperhead bites on the legs. I don’t think either got antivenin. I’ll have to check and report back.

Regardless, 200 bucks for snake boots during dove season doesn’t seem so expensive after all.

Crotalid.  Pit viper.

And yes, shit's expensive.  $3000/vial is my cost.

Multiple doses, most likely.

Based on OP's pictures, agreed.  Copperheads really aren't that dangerous overall, compared to others.

Similar story from way back in the day.  Dumbass decided to play with a coral snake until it finally bit him.  We had some antivenin, and got a call asking for it.  They sent a GA state trooper with one of the 5.0 Mustangs they used to drive to come get it.  Dude was excited to have an opportunity to open it up.  I heard he made a normally 45-50 minute drive up I-95 in 22 minutes door to door.  

 If those hicks had just left the snakes alone,where they belonged and where they hurt no one,there would have been zero need.

This along with not much demand for the product...but mostly billing scam

@ W_E_G  Did it give the number of Units given?

This. What they bill and what they’re paid by contract are two different things....I once read a CT scan and MRI bill to my insurance provider over the phone and she burst out laughing, then told me what the actual pricing schedule was with that healthcare company.

Something like 90 percent of bites happen when trying to catch or kill the snake, so not doing that alone greatly reduces the chances of being bitten.

Bites like the OP's wife, true accidents, are very rare. Glad she's OK.

If you buy foreign antivenom you also need to find a doctor authorized to administer it. From what I understand it's considered an experimental drug in the US, and the doctor needs to have an extra string of letters on his license.

I've talked to keepers who travelled to those areas, and brought several vials home as "personal use pharmaceuticals".

A friend was bitten by a cottonmouth about twenty years ago.

His anti-venom bill, for sixteen vials, was about $40,000 even back then.   Luckily, he was on the job (wildlife officer actually trying to cash Cottonmouths for anti-venom research, ironically).





On his way to the hospital, he call the ER and told them to start getting the anti-venom, and the nurse told him,  "Well, let's just wait to you get here.  A lot of people think they've been bitten by a cottonmouth, when it's just a non-poisonous water snake."

And, he had to reply, "I'm the chief wildlife biologist for the state, I know what bit me.  Get the venom ready."