Docs stunned after Oz girl, 10, survives box jellyfish attack

LONDON - Doctors in Australia are stunned after a 10-year-old girl survived being stung by the world’s most venomous creature.

Rachael Shardlow was stung on her legs by a box jellyfish while she was swimming upstream from the ocean mouth of Queensland’s Calliope River.

Her 13-year old brother pulled her onto the shore and she told him that she could not see or breathe and later on she fell unconscious with the tentacles still wrapped around her limbs.

The poison of the box jellyfish is so painful that victims often go in shock and drown or die of heart failure before reaching shore.

There is no effective antivenom for its sting, which attacks the heart, nervous system and skin, inducing shooting muscle pain, vomiting and a rapid rise in blood pressure.

However, Rachael managed to survive.

Jamie Seymour, Zoology and tropical ecology associate professor at James Cook University, said that the case has shocked everyone.

“I don’t know of anybody in the entire literature where we’ve studied this where someone has had such an extensive sting that has survived,” the Telegraph quoted him as telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“When I first saw the pictures of the injuries I just went, ‘you know to be honest, this kid should not be alive’. I mean they are horrific.

“Usually when you see people who have been stung by box jellyfish with that number of the tentacle contacts on their body, it’s usually in a morgue,” he added. (ANI)