Under fifty
Mexico's antivenom programme took a national scorpion toll down from about 2,000 deaths a year. The world estimate on the card is still about 3,000, and it is short.
This counter is about 3,000 deaths a year. That is a round number inside a published range, roughly 2,600 to 3,250, drawn from national health data rather than from a single world register. The papers that produce it say the deaths are under-reported. The card's second line says the same thing: estimate, short.
The drop
A World Health Organization account from 2007, in a report on neglected tropical diseases, described the Mexican series. About 250,000 scorpion stings were reported there each year. Fatalities had fallen from about 2,000 a year to under 50, after antivenom was distributed widely. Tunisia, in the same account, was reporting about 40,000 stings and about 100 deaths a year. The "under fifty" is that Mexican drop, as told in 2007. It is not a claim about this year's Mexican total.
Later reviews still put the world at something like 1.2 to 1.5 million stings and a few thousand deaths. A 2025 note in BMJ Global Health says more than 1.5 million cases and over 3,250 deaths a year, and that both figures are likely low. The Ledger's 3,000 sits in that band and does not pretend to be the ceiling.
Why it is not the poison card
Poisonous Toxins, at 60,000 a year, is accidental swallowing or inhalation: carbon monoxide, pesticides, household chemicals. A scorpion sting is a contact. The two cards can be read beside each other. They should not be added, and the sting should not be filed under the bottle.
Snakebite is the temptation next to this card, and it does not belong in the rare column. The same neglected-disease literature puts snakebite deaths on the order of 100,000 a year, which is the shelf of the burns counter, not of this one.
The rest of the rare column is sorted in How rare is a rare death?.