ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the actual situation and provides data for an easy access to antivenoms against animal envenomations. The selection of the adequate hyperimmune serum has to meet two requirements: specificity and availability. Since due to the risk of anaphylactic complications, an antivenin therapy should only be performed by experienced medical doctors on one hand, and since on the other hand a five to ten ampoule package of a hyperimmune serum necessary for such a treatment is quite expensive, such prerequisites make sense only under certain circumstances. There existed monovalent antivenins for the Mediterranean fish species of the genus Trachinus and Scorpaena, respectively and a polyvalent antivenin which is said to neutralize also envenomations caused by Uranoscopus scaber. One antivenin is available against envenomation caused by the Australian mygalomorph Sidney Funnel-web spider (Atrax robustus) and a number of antivenins are available for the specific treatment of araneomorph spiders of the genera Latrodectus, Loxosceles and Phoneutria, respectively.
