I haven’t seen this at all. Aside from the toxicity of them (which is debatable either way) can you give an example of this? All I’ve seen is advocating about how to keep them safely and erring on the cautious side.
How else would you propose LD50 is measured? They aren’t going to be measured on humans or other primates. This is how it is measured in pretty much all scientific studies. There’s a reason why mice are used for this. Because they are very similar to humans and as close as you can realistically get. If scientists measure the LD50 of medications on mice, then it’s accurate to humans.
Mice are many times smaller than humans. Humans can overdose and die from drinking too much water – as well as mice. The lethal water dosages for mice does not mean that if a human will die if they drink that much water, indeed, it is the converse of not enough.
I stayed mum re: @rmleone persistent emphasis on scorpion lethality until about maybe 7 or 8 entries in & opted out of following up on my posting where I finally broached the issue. I’ve seen a number of factual inaccuracies aside from that & opted out entirely for addressing those (one that quickly comes to mind is her account of scorpion evolution). And to be fair, all venom poses some risk due to the possibility of an allergic reaction, but so does eating new food.
LD50 is measured in mg/kg, so if a mice population (in a lab) is 0.5 kg each (as an example) and it takes 0.1 mg to kill half of them, then the LD50 is 0.2 mg/kg. That means that a 75 kg human could be killed with 15mg of the toxin.
Over 3,000 people die from scorpions annually, so yes, they are lethal. Often it’s from 3rd world countries and the chance of dying from a sting is very, very low, but it’s not zero. The point is that keepers need to be careful with them, because they are dangerous, but not often deadly. We all can agree that keepers need to be careful around them and not be reckless.
I don’t want to argue about it, but just clear up misinformation and confusion.
Oh, I appreciate the LD50 built-in weight correction; no argument here.
There is still quite an argument about the underlying causes of the fatalities you mentioned, however. I’ll respect your desire to not go there but will say that just stating raw numbers is not informative and is misleading unto itself. It’s clearly substantially worse when one claims that if you are stung, you will likely die and asserts it as fact, and I’d like to think you recognize that.
I agree that if you are stung, there is a very, very low chance of death. It’s estimated that there are over 1 million stings each year, resulting in 3000 deaths (roughly 0.3% chance of death from a sting, I’m guessing that it’s much lower to healthy adults). As long as these creatures are respected and caution is taken, they are very safe pets.