Approach to the epidemiology of venomous bites in Spain.

This review presents a geographic distribution of the three autochthonous venomous snake species, which are the only viperids present in Spain, among the Iberian fauna: Vipera aspid; Vipera seoianei and Vipera latasti. This is followed by a detailed descriptive analysis of hospital care provided to patients admitted into hospital due to venomous bites, in the period from 1997 to 2009, using the data from the Spanish hospital discharge registry database. This analysis reveals that in Spain, during this period, 1649 cases were recorded, which means that hospital care was required for more than one hundred cases per year, of which nearly 1% of the cases resulted in death.