Taipan size. In 1950, Kevin Budden, an amateur herpetologist, was one of the first people to capture a taipan alive, although he was bitten in the process and died the next day. The snake, which ended up dying a few weeks later, was milked by Melbourne zoologist David Fleay and its venom used to develop an antivenom, which became available in 1955. In his book "Venom", which explores the development of a taipan antivenom in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s, author Brendan James Murray argues that only one person is known to have survived an Oxyuranus bite without antivenom: George
Coastal taipan being bitten, but the average is around 2.5 hours. The time between a bite and death depends on various factors such as the nature of the bite and the constitution of the victim. Untreated bites have a mortality rate of 100% as the coastal taipan always delivers a fatal dose of venom (an average bite delivers 10-12x the lethal dose of venom for a human adult male), and medical professionals recommend that victims seek immediate medical attention even for apparently minor bites. Before the introduction of specific antivenom by the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in 1956, nearly all bites were fatal.