About 50% or more of cases don’t actually result in envenomation, so you would be wasting expensive antivenom that comes itself with severe side effects. Death

About 50% or more of cases don’t actually result in envenomation, so you would be wasting expensive antivenom that comes itself with severe side effects. Death adders and tipans will end your life rapidly but browns, blacks and the rest you should have enough time to get to hospital. When someone turns up in ED we need to make sure they are envenomated before administering the antidote. Further, everything in health is decided by economics. There are 550 snake bites in Australia (approx) with around 2 deaths a year. Antivenom costs around $5-10k per hit. Economics of making it ‘more’ available don’t really add up, and we do a pretty damn good with current availability