You're stung by a jellyfish.
What's your first course of action?
Maybe home remedies pop into your mind
peeing on the sting site,
applying ice or using baking soda.
If tentacles are sticking to your skin, you probably feel
like you want to scrape them off.
But none of these treatments work, and some will make things worse.
And if you're stung by a box jellyfish, that could make
the difference between life and death.
We're in an area where there's very
little tolerance for mistakes,
and things that make things worse are a real tragedy
in our mind.
That's Angel Yanagihara, a researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa
who has been studying jellyfish venom for two decades.
Box jellyfish, members of the Cubozoa class,
live in tropical and temperate waters around the world.
They're common in the Pacific, near the coast of the
Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Australia.
They inject venom into your skin by firing
microscopic hypodermic needles at speeds
of more than 60 kilometres an hour.
The venom is a chemical cocktail that at
high doses can cause cardiac arrest in
less than five minutes.
Yanagihara has developed products to counter the sting,
a spray containing vinegar and urea
and a cream containing copper gluconate.
The spray , so it stops the cells from firing
the tentacle from firing all this venom.
It doesn't stop the venom that's already in the body.
The cream on the other hand, does that.
Yanagihara stresses that some home remedies
also work. Simple vinegar can stop unfired venom cells
as well. and heat can block venom already injected.
Not everybody agrees however, one scientist
says vinegar can actually make things worse.
All jellyfish venom scientists agree
that more research is needed on how the venom works,
and what can be done to stop.
In just the months of June and July itself
there were at least three kids,
I guess you can call them, who died from
box jellyfish in the Philippines itself.
It might just seem like a minor part of
the first-aid compendium and what does
it matter if you say put ice on it or
put heat on it or put either on it.
If one takes a global perspective, then it's
pretty clear pretty rapidly why that matters.
Another question needs more research as well,
how many people get stung by jellyfish
and how many die?
There are no official statistics, and Yanagihara thinks the
problem is more serious than people realize.
When I went to these rural health offices
and I would ask the group how many people had been
stung by a box jellyfish, a good third in a lot of
these places would raise their hands.
Unfortunately in the Philippines, most of
these deaths aren't recorded, aren't ever reported
forward. They're considered environmental accidents, and
so they're basically lost to us.
To get a better handle on the problem, Yanagihara's
team is surveying health workers and coastal
communities in the Philippines.
They're also educating people about the risk of jellyfish
stings, and conducting research on the jellyfish population.
So we see our role there in a three-part way.
One is the public health piece, which is getting the data.
One is the public education piece, which is about
prevention and understanding, and then the third piece
is just the field ecology.
Better understanding jellyfish ecology might
help prevent injury, because people could
be warned about when to avoid the water.
The solution could be as simple as just
making people realize that this is
this can kill this is when it comes,
don't really go into the sea at this at this point of the year.
By showing that jellyfish are a serious public health
problem, Yanagihara hopes that research funders
will pay more attention.
If jellyfish stings are underreported, basically they
don't meet even the most minor threshold
for any asset allocation.
Professional scientists need to be really even more
engaged in the public sphere, and in cases in which
There's real emotional pain and suffering,
if scientists stay in the ivory tower,
The general populace doesn't feel connected with scientists.