“Spider Bites” – Not Always From Spiders
This is shocking: doctors are not entomologists. If you’ve ever been told (or just assumed) that a festering wound was a spider bite, but you’ve never caught a spider in the act, chances are your illness was something else.
And this is also not entirely your doctor’s fault. A recent analysis published in Toxicon shows that published medical research on spider bites – in other words, the ones your doctor relied on – is often wrong. The authors concluded that 78% of publications on spider bites are unreliable because either no one saw the spider bite the patient, or because the spider was not identified by an appropriate expert.
So what are these festering wounds really? Many of these are infections caused by methicillin resistance Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) . A group of spider researchers at the University of California, Riverside have compiled a list of non-spider bite conditions commonly blamed on spiders. The brown recluse Loxosceles reclusa is commonly blamed for many of these, although there are no brown recluses in most parts of the country.
Arachnophobia in the Medical Literature: How Reliable Are Published Spider Bites? | Discover
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