Other doctors saw these case reports, made similar diagnosis, and the whole thing snowballed from there. Wanting a quick answer, they diagnosed the wound as a ‘spider bite’ and sent the patients on their way. The researchers had been unwittingly working with a model poorly suited to this sort of study.ĭoctors who were looking to diagnose patients saw these papers, and noticed some of their patients had wounds which looked similar. In this case, the tests run on Guinea pigs weren’t as informative as they should have been. Guinea pigs are known to be more sensitive to spider venom than people are. Regardless, Vetter was eventually able to trace the origins of the myth back to tests run on Guinea pigs. Vetter accepts the wound was from the spider’s venom, although I kind of wonder if it’s an infection. The wound was about a quarter-inch across, and nothing like the wounds produced by Brown Recuses. Of the 40 Sac spider bites where the spider had been collected, only one bite from Europe produced a necrotic wound. He also went through the literature, and looked only at cases where the spider had been collected and positively ID’d. They’d take a call from a poison control center, get the person to collect the spider, and then follow the person’s symptoms as they recovered. In order to investigate whether the bites of Sac Spiders caused necrosis, he formed a group of scientists and they personally investigated as many spider bites as they could. Rick Vetter is a bit of a celebrity among entomologists, because he’s made a career of pointing out that spider bites are rarely correctly diagnosed by medical professionals. This rumor was addressed in the scientific literature in 2006, by Rick Vetter. The Penn State University website is one of these. There are some fact sheets, however, which do get it right. Often times, University extension websites link to one another…like the University of Wyoming website which links to the Utah State University website. Some notable examples include the University of Nebraska, Utah State University, Washington State, and the University of Minnesota. This rumor has made it onto quite a few University Entomology extension websites. This sort of bite is called a necrotic bite, and that means it makes a lot of dead flesh. The problem is that a lot of sources say that this spider has a bite similar to the Brown Recluse in that it causes a big wound that festers for weeks. Compared to a Black Widow, this is pretty mild. Given how often these spiders are found in people’s homes, it’s very likely that these symptoms all reflect a worst-case scenario. It should be pointed out that these descriptions come from people who were bothered enough to seek medical attention.
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