Hognose_311 said:
if you see a rattlesnake you know it's a rattlesnake, ofcourse you need almost the exact species identification,for the antivenom,
No, you don't. There are only three choices of antivenom for North American snakes in hospitals today.
1. Wyeth coral snake antivenom. It's not too hard to tell a coral snake from a rattlesnake.
2. CroFab. This is a polyvalent that is supposed to be effective against all of the North American vipers. Clean product with minimal side effects, but bloody expensive and you tend to need a lot more vials.
3. Wyeth polyvalent. Same as above, only cheaper and with more side effects. A bit outdated but there are still current stocks in place.
There is generally going to be a hospital wide policy about which antivenom gets used or stocked, so the patient is not going to have any choice of antivenoms. If it's a viper bite, you're going to get either CroFab or Wyeth. Which one is likely to depend on which drug companies and distributors the hospital is dealing with and/or what historical stocks they still have around.
No, you don't need species identification in North America to treat venomous snake bite, except to differentiate between a coral snake and everything else.
It's nice to know in advance whether the patient was bitten by one of the more neurotoxic vipers (Mojave green, Georgia canebrake) so the docs can have the ventilators ready, but the obvious clue of the early signs of neuromuscular paralysis should make it a pretty clear picture.
Doctors tend to deal with the symptoms of snakebite as they occur; they really aren't helped all that much by knowing what the species was. Certainly not in terms of antivenom administration.
