Neuroscience

Saving the brain with a new nerve agent antidote

Terror on a Tokyo subway, 1995; attacks on Syrian civilians, 2013 and 2017; assassinations in an airport in Kuala Lumpur, 2017; attempted assassination in London, 2018. Tremors, foaming at the mouth, seizures, respiratory ...

Medications

Philadelphia wants safe injection sites to help opioid fight

Philadelphia wants to become the first U.S. city to allow supervised drug injection sites as a way to combat the opioid epidemic, officials announced Tuesday, saying they are seeking outside operators to establish one or ...

Medications

West Virginia distributing 8,000 overdose antidote kits

West Virginia health officials are responding to opioid overdoses by distributing more than 8,000 kits with an antidote—Naloxone—that can get people breathing again if administered in time.

Medications

Getting overdose antidote with painkillers may cut ER visits

Overdoses don't happen just to heroin addicts—patients who legally use strong painkillers called opioids are at risk in the nation's epidemic, too. A new study says when patients were prescribed an overdose antidote along ...

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Antidote

An antidote is a substance which can counteract a form of poisoning. The term ultimately derives from the Greek αντιδιδοναι antididonai, "given against".

The antidotes for some particular toxins are manufactured by injecting the toxin into an animal in small doses and extracting the resulting antibodies from the host animals' blood. This results in an antivenom that can be used to counteract poison produced by certain species of snakes, spiders, and other venomous animals. A number of venoms lack a viable antivenom, and a bite or sting from an animal producing such a toxin often results in death. Some animal venoms, especially those produced by arthropods (e.g. certain spiders, scorpions, bees, etc.) are only potentially lethal when they provoke allergic reactions and induce anaphylactic shock; as such, there is no "antidote" for these venoms because it is not a form of poisoning, though anaphylactic shock can be treated (e.g., by the use of epinephrine).

Some other toxins have no known antidote. For example, the poison ricin, which is produced from the waste byproduct of castor oil manufacture, has no antidote, and as a result is often fatal if it enters the human body in sufficient quantities.

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