For Australian tourists travelling to Thailand, there have been warnings about terrorist threats and political instability. But nowhere has the travel advice contained warnings about fatal jellyfish stings.

One Australian man is working hard to change that after his son was nearly killed by a box jellyfish while the family was holidaying at a Thai beach.

Last summer, Andrew Jones took his young family on a holiday, but his four-year-old son Lewis was stung will swimming off a small beach.

As Mr Jones explains, things quickly became the stuff of nightmares.

"All of a sudden he stopped and screamed a really horrible scream. I never heard it before and I never want to hear it again," he said.

"So I just raced out into the water and pulled him out onto the beach and he was absolutely hysterical and it was really only - it took a little while to register that it was in fact a jellyfish.

"We had a pretty traumatic time from that moment on to try and firstly save his life, as he ran in to a spot of bother. He went straight into cardiac and respiratory arrest."

A quick-thinking chef from a nearby resort threw vinegar on the four-year-old's wounds. It saved the little boy's life.

Mr Jones says he would never let his family swim off the north Queensland coast because of fears of stingers, but he had no idea the waters around Thailand were just as dangerous.

"The horror of it was the fact that we knew nothing about there even being box jellyfish in this area; there's no signage, obviously this is Thailand," Mr Jones said.

"But there's no warnings from anybody there that they might be around, whereas you see lots of warnings in places like Queensland and the Northern Territory.

"The box jellyfish is renowned to be the most venomous creature on the planet and when it wraps its tentacles around a little four-year-old, it can cause some serious damage. So in actual fact he's lucky to be alive."

Raising awareness

Since then, Mr Jones has launched a dedicated campaign to make the beaches of Thailand safer.

He has travelled back to Bangkok, holding meetings with the Thai Government, local scientists and consular officials from Australia and other big tourist nations.

He says his biggest hurdle in raising awareness of stingers has been a massive resistance from tourism operators, worried about the bad publicity.

"Several years earlier in 2002, a Melbourne man had been stung and actually died on Koh Samui and the authorities there actually tried to cover this up," Mr Jones said.

"There were signs put up on the beach warning tourists of the problem, but all the local operators pulled those down because they didn't want any affect on tourism and that seems to be generally the attitude."

But last year, Mr Jones teamed up with jellyfish expert Lisa Gershwin and the pair have made real progress.

As the curator of Natural Science at the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston, Dr Gershwin says the key has been knocking down cultural boundaries that made fatal jellyfish stings go undetected by Thai authorities.

"I don't think it's that they [are] ignoring the problem. I think it's that they simply didn't know," she said.

"Most of the people getting stung in Thailand are either fisherman in little villages and they don't require death certificates and there's kind of a cultural thing that if you get killed by the ocean, it's because you pissed it off.

"So there's these cultural beliefs and local customs that don't really make jellyfish fatalities something reportable."

- Based on a story aired on Saturday AM, January 31.