Anti-venom Crisis

Sanofi Pasteur, the world’s largest producer of anti-venom, will stop producing the product starting on June 2016.

12:51 08 September 2015

Sanofi Pasteur, the world’s largest producer of anti-venom, will stop producing the product once its stock is exhausted on June 2016, as Mexican, Brazilian, and Indian companies enter the African market with cut-price drugs.

 

The company said that treating bites from snakes like vipers, mambas, and cobras just doesn’t add up anymore. However, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), says that the company’s decision could lead to the death of tens of thousands of people.

 

Abdulrazaq Habib, a professor of infectious and tropical diseases at Bayero University in Kano, Nigeria, said: “Fav-Afrique is no longer being manufactured so vulnerable farmers will lose their lives or limbs.”

 

Meanwhile, Professor David Warrell, international director of the Royal College of Physicians and principal fellow of the Australian Venom Research Unit at Melbourne University, told The Independent: “What should be done? Shame WHO, international funding bodies, governments and the tropical medicine community for ignoring this problem. We must deal with this.”

 

“We are now facing a real crisis,” Dr Gabriel Alcoba, the charity’s snake bite adviser, said. “Imagine how frightening it must be to be bitten by a snake – to feel the pain and venom spread through your body – knowing it may kill you and there is no treatment available or that you can’t afford to pay for it?”