mwj@lanl.gov (William Johnson) (12/21/89)
In article <1989Dec19.151951.15074@cs.rochester.edu>, ray@cs.rochester.edu (Ray Frank) writes: > I was having a discussion a while back concerning spiders and the dangers > of being bitten by them. Are the black widow and the brown recluse spiders > the only ones that can cause medical problems or are there other types > of spiders whose bites can result in anything from minor to more serious > medical problems? I'm talking about spiders in the U.S. only. A good question. Such references as I've consulted seem to say that all of the other domestic spiders cause no more than localized pain with their bites, aside from the possibility of an individual allergic reaction, of course. However, a curious set of events around here back around 1981 makes me wonder about this. A co-worker from that time spent a while in the hospital as a result of a bite from some little critter that was never identified, except for a body part that suggested it was *not* a black widow or brown recluse. (The part was a long, black, hairy leg that he found in his sheets; the bite happened at night while he was asleep. Black widows have long, black legs that aren't hairy, and brown-recluse legs are hairy but brown and small, like the rest of the spider. BTW, crude jokes about this are directed to /dev/null...) The guy suffered various neurological disturbances including pain, extreme sensitivity to touch, and a long-lasting set of mood swings that eventually required some fairly heavy-duty therapy. What was interesting was that when he finally did recover enough to come back to work, he mentioned that his physician had seen at least one other case lately with exactly the same symptoms, including near-suicidal depression as part of the mood swings. Whatever the critter was that chomped him, it apparently got somebody else too, suggesting that my friend's reaction wasn't just an allergy. I've wondered about that ever since. Has anyone else heard of violent neurological reactions to bites of "harmless" spiders? I've taken the liberty of cross-posting this to sci.bio in the hope of picking up some expertise from there. -- Bill Johnson | Anticipating computer news systems by Los Alamos National Laboratory | 1900 years, Juvenal wrote: "Difficile (mwj@beta.lanl.gov) | est saturam non scribere."