Its range covers a wide sweep of territory in the Sahara, Arabian Desert, Thar Desert, and Central Asia, from Algeria and Mali in the west through to Egypt, Ethiopia, Asia Minor and the Arabian Peninsula, eastwards to Kazakhstan and western India in the northeast and southeast.

The US Armed Forces maintain an investigational drug application[18] for the AVPC-Riyadh antivenom in the event of envenomation of soldiers in the Gulf War theater of operations, and the Florida Antivenin Bank, managed by the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department, maintains Sanofi Pasteur's Scorpifav antivenom for the deathstalker.

[citation needed] In 2015 clinical trials were beginning of the use of chlorotoxin with a fluorescent molecule attached as brain tumour "paint" (BLZ-100), to mark cancerous cells in real time during an operation.

In preclinical animal trials the technique could highlight extremely small clusters of as few as 200 cancer cells, compared to the standard use of MRI, with a lower limit in excess of 500,000.

In several jurisdictions departments of fish and wildlife require permits for many animals,[22][23] and a number of cities and municipal governments have prohibited their possession in their bylaws.