Scorpion stings man during flight; incident is at least the third in 2007
An airline passenger says he was stung by a scorpion on board a flight from San Jose, Costa Rica, to Madrid. The unidentified flier says he was stung both on his shoulder and on a finger, according to The Age newspaper of Australia. "The victim had felt severe nausea after being stung by the creature, which was caught and killed by fellow passengers," says a wire report carried by the Monsters & Critics website. A doctor who happened to be traveling on the same flight treated the man, who received medical attention upon landing at Madrid's airport and was cleared to go on his way. "Someone must have smuggled the scorpion onto the aeroplane and let it out there," an Iberia representative says. "The motive is not clear."
Despite the apparent oddity of the incident, scorpions and flying seem to mix more often than one might think. In 2005, a man was stung by a scorpion while checking in for a flight in New Zealand –- a country not known to be home to any venomous insects or snakes, AP reports. And in the USA, there were two reports of scorpions on planes during a single week this past January. In one incident, a man flying from San Francisco to Burlington, Vt., was stung twice by a scorpion on his connecting United flight between Chicago O'Hare and Vermont, according to AP. That same week, the Toronto Star says a man on an American Airlines flight from Miami to Toronto flight was stung by a scorpion that "apparently got through security in Costa Rica in the man's carry-on knapsack."