< UCR Entomology Spiders - Hyperbole 2003

Jumping Spider

The horrid thumb injury photos allegedly caused by a spider bite

Revised 21 Jul 2006

 


I have received this set of images of a horrid injury to a thumb from many people starting in June 2003 with the alleged cause being that from a spider, most commonly attributed to a brown recluse.  In March-April 2006, a new flurry of emails started this series of photos again, distributed to “educate” people about the horrors of brown recluse bites.  It is possible that this is a spider bite however, the stories surrounding this series of images have acquired the makings of an urban legend.  I have now heard that this wound supposedly was a brown recluse bite that occurred at a military base in Missouri, in Wisconsin, Texas, Montana, Ohio, California, Alberta Canada, Costa Rica and supposedly was a hobo spider bite in British Columbia. The SNOPES mythbuster site states that allegedly the injury occurred to a professor at Kilgore College in Texas but attempts to confirm this went unanswered. In August of 2005, a Belgian arachnologist informed me that this same series of photos has been circulating in Belgium as alleged African spider bites occurring in Belgian people, that you have only 14 minutes to get to a hospital for treatment and that 88% of the bite victims lose a limb due to the bite.  In April 2006, an arachnologist told me that this was being distributed as a solpugid bite in an American soldier in Iraq?  So what is it?  A recluse bite?  A hobo spider bite?  An African spider bite?  A solpugid bite?  Which is correct?   The recluse bite?  Why?  Just because the person who sent it to you said it was?  How do you think the Belgians feel about that?  How about the person who was told it was a hobo spider bite?  What basis and proof do you have that it is any of these alleged causes other than someone sent you the email stating that that is what it was?

 

Obviously, this one series of pictures cannot be bites by all these different arachnids in all of these places so one should REALLY question the validity of this information that is circulating.  Unfortunately, I have heard that readily accepting people are using these images for PowerPoint presentations in paramedic classes etc. which may be spreading misinformation rather than educating people.  The picture of the recluse spider itself is not of the spider that caused the wound (as some have claimed) but is a stock photo from an Ohio university website.  This image was used in 2002 in a very hyperbolic news story in Long Island, New York.  Although it is possible that this is a recluse bite, no one can seem to verify where the alleged bite occurred, whether a spider was caught in the act of biting or at the scene of the crime, whether the victim was tested for additional etiologic agents of necrosis such as bacterial infection, if a doctor actually made the diagnosis or if it was a self-diagnosis from the victim, if the diagnosis came from an area of the country that actually has brown recluses, etc.  Again, what proof do you have that this is a spider-related injury except for the fact that the person sending you this email says that it is?

 

However, the main effect that this set of images will have is to cause paranoia in the non-arachnological public, bring out all the "me, too" stories of people who have some alleged brown recluse story and will proliferate once again the hyperbolic message about recluses.  One of the forms of this series that I saw was a statement something like, "warn people - save a life".  Once again, hyperbole.  I have added a web page to my spiders.ucr.edu website lifting quotes from an article by Phillip Anderson, a Missouri dermatologist who specialized on brown recluse bites for over 30 years.  Basically here is a summary from his article and several since then by other authors.

  • Almost all brown recluse bites heal very nicely without medical intervention.
  • Only 3% of brown recluse bites require skin grafts. 
  • Despite the fact that lots of people believe that brown recluses are deadly, there are only about 8 reported deaths from possible brown recluse bites in the medical literature, Philip Anderson states that there is still not one VERIFIED death from a brown recluse bite and none of the alleged fatal cases are convincing.
  • often physicians will make a recluse bite worse by going in and messing with it by removing tissue and that outcome for most recluse bite situations is very promising with general care.  One condition of skin necrosis, pyoderma gangrenosum, gets worse when tissue is removed so misdiagnosis in this condition and debridement of tissue makes it worse. 
I get lots of people contacting me stating that their doctors diagnosed them with recluse bites and then gave antibiotics.  Although antibiotics are not a bad idea overall, they do nothing to counteract the effects of venom.  Antibiotics kill bacteria.  The correct treatment for most recluse bites is simply RICE therapy (rest, ice, compression and elevation).  So therefore when a doctor prescribes antibiotics for a “brown recluse bite”, the doctor is either treating it like a bacterial infection or prescribing the incorrect remedy.

 

The analogy I like to use with these images is that of a car accident.  If you show a car wreck where the driver was going 130 miles an hour and then hit a bridge, the car would be totally wrecked into dozens of twisted pieces, body parts strewn all over the place and it would be horrendous.  If people reacted to this the way they are reacting to the thumb picture, then they would make the assumption that every car wreck is just as catastrophic, cars are to be feared and no one should ever drive because they will end up obliterated across two counties.  However, we all know that many car accidents are just bumper scrapers or fender benders, more serious accidents involve broken windows and minor injuries, even more serious and less common accidents involve smashed up cars and broken bones and maybe death.  Similar to recluse bites, most bites are minor and heal by themselves, some are more serious and require more healing time and leave a scar, even more serious and less common bites require extensive supportive medical care and possibly skin grafts.  However, the typical case for a brown recluse bite is minor in effect and prospects for healing are excellent.

 

One of the very real problems with recluse bites (and any arthropod bite for that matter) is that the bite causes itching, the victim scratches, introduces a secondary bacterial infection from grungy fingernails and such, a horrific wound shows up and then the wound is solely blamed on the arthropod when the real culprit is the bite victim him/herself.  Additionally, besides horrific lesions being very rare in recluse bite situations, horrific recluse-induced wounds are typically found in obese people because recluse venom melts away adipose tissue.  It does very little damage in muscular tissue.  This wound is on the hand of a person who does not look obese as well as the hand is not an area of the body with lots of adipose tissue in comparison to the stomach and buttocks where most of the wounds in the obese occur.  So, this is one strong argument against this injury being a recluse bite and therefore, possibly having a different causative agent.  Additionally, I showed the images to a colleague of mine who is a dermatologist in Missouri who specializes in brown recluse bites and he thought it wasn’t a recluse bite and more likely is a bacterial infection.

 

So the final summary on this is that if it indeed is a brown recluse bite, then it is truly one of the very rare, horrific ones however, there is not sufficient information provided with this image to ascertain whether it is credible or not.  Yes, indeed, it is a horrible wound but unless a spider was found in the act of biting, there is no more reason to assume that this is a brown recluse bite than to assume that it is necrotizing bacteria or pyoderma gangrenosum or several other medical afflictions that manifest in the dermatologic eruption that can occur. An article of mine shows how unlikely recluse bites are: a family in Kansas collected over two thousand brown recluses in 6 months, have been living there for 8 years and still have shown no evidence of a bite.  This latter message is rarely advertised by the hyperbolic news media or the easily scared general public because people have a tendency to overreact and want to believe the worse about a situation.

 

Please send this message back to whomever sent you the thumb images.  Below my name is a list of my brown recluse publications, most of them in medical journals, many of them addressing the mythology of spider bites in both the medical community and the general public.

 

Rick Vetter

Entomology

Univ. Calif. Riverside

Riverside, CA  92521

 

Vetter, R. S., B. B. Pagac, R. W.  Reiland, D. T. Bolesh and D. L. Swanson. 2006.  Skin lesions in barracks: consider community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection instead of spider bites. Military Medicine 171: (in press as of Jul 2006)

 

Swanson, D. L. and R. S. Vetter.  2006.  Loxoscelism.  Clin. Dermatol. 24:213-221.

 

Vetter, R. S. and R. B. Furbee.  2006.  Caveats in interpreting poison control centre data for spider bites in epidemiology studies. Public Health 120: 179-181.

 

Swanson, D. L. and R. S. Vetter.  2005.  Bites of brown recluse spiders and suspected necrotic arachnidism.  New Engl. J. Med. 352:700-707.

 

Vetter, R. S.  2005.  Arachnids submitted as suspected brown recluse spiders (Araneae: Sicariidae): Loxosceles species are virtually restricted to their known distributions but are perceived to exist throughout the United States.  J. Med. Entomol. 42: 512-521.

 

Schmid, G. and R. Vetter. 2005.    Spider bites (mis)masquerading as infectious cellulitis [letter]   Ann Intern Med (online only) http://www.annals.org/cgi/eletters/142/1/47#1215

 

Vetter, R. S. and D. L. Swanson.  2005.  Arthropods in dermatology: errors in arachnology [letter].   J. Amer. Academy Dermatol. 52: 923.

 

Isbister, G. K., J. White, B. J. Currie, S. P. Bush, R. S. Vetter and D. A. Warrell.  2005.  Spider bites: addressing mythology and poor evidence. Amer. J. Tropical Med. Hygiene  72:361-364.

 

Isbister, G. K. and R. S. Vetter.   2005.  Necrotic arachnidism: more myths and minor corrections. [Letter]  Annals Emerg. Medicine  46: 205-206.

 

Vetter, R. S. and S. P. Bush.  2004.  Additional considerations regarding brown recluse spider bites and dapsone therapy [letter].  Amer. J. Emerg. Med.  22: 494-495.

 

Vetter, R. S. and G. K. Isbister.  2004.  Do hobo spider bites cause dermonecrotic injuries?  Annals Emerg. Med. 44:605-607  

 

Bennett, R. G. and R. S. Vetter. 2004.  Erroneous attribution of dermonecrotic lesions to brown recluse or hobo spiders in Canada.  Canadian Family Physician  50:1098-1101 

 

Vetter, R. S.  2004.  Myths about spider envenomations and necrotic skin lesions.   Lancet  364:484-485.

 

Vetter, R. S., G. B. Edwards and L. F. James.  2004.  Reports of envenomation by brown recluse spiders (Araneae: Sicariidae) outnumber verifications of Loxosceles spiders in Florida. J. Medical Entomol. 41:593-597 

 

Vetter, R. S., P. E. Cushing, R. L. Crawford and L. A. Royce.  2003.   Diagnoses of brown recluse spider bites (loxoscelism) greatly outnumber actual verifications of the spider in four western American states.  Toxicon 42:413-418 

 

Vetter, R. S.  2003.  Brown recluse spider bite diagnoses and lawsuits.  Pediatric Emergency Care. 19:291-292

 

Vetter, R. S., A. H. Roe, R. G. Bennett, C. R. Baird, L. A. Royce, W. T. Lanier, A. L. Antonelli and P.E. Cushing. 2003.  Distribution of the medically-implicated hobo spider (Araneae: Agelenidae) and its harmless congener, Tegenaria duellica in the United States and Canada. J. Med. Entomol. 40: 159-164.

 

Vetter, R. S. and D. K. Barger. 2002. An infestation of 2,055 brown recluse spiders (Araneae: Sicariidae) and no envenomations in a Kansas home: implications for bite diagnoses in non-endemic areas. J. Med. Entomol. 39:948-951.

 

Vetter, R. S. and S. P. Bush.  2002. Chemical burn misdiagnosed as brown recluse spider bite.  Amer. J. Emerg. Medicine 20: 68-69.

Vetter, R. S. and S. P. Bush.  2002. The diagnosis of brown recluse spider bite is overused for dermonecrotic wounds of uncertain etiology.  Ann. Emerg. Medicine 39: 544-546.

 

Vetter, R. S. and S. P. Bush.  2002.  Reports of presumptive brown recluse spider bites reinforce improbable diagnosis in regions of North America where the spider is not endemic.  Clinical Infectious Diseases 35:442-445

 

Bush, S. P.,  P. Giem, and R. S. Vetter.  2000.  Green lynx spider (Peucetia viridans) envenomation.  Amer. J. Emerg. Medicine 18:64-66

 

Vetter, R. S. 2000.  Brown recluse and other recluse spiders: Integrated pest management in and around the home.  Univ. Calif. Pest Notes #7468, 4pp. http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7468.html

 

Vetter, R. S.  2000. Myth: idiopathic wounds are often due to brown recluse or other spider bites throughout the United States.  Western J. Medicine 173:357-358 

 

Vetter, R. S. 1999. Identifying and misidentifying the brown recluse spider.

Dermatol. Online 5 (2):         http://matrix.ucdavis.edu/DOJvol5num2/special/recluse.html

 

Vetter, R.S.  1998. Envenomation by an agelenid spider, Agelenopsis aperta,  previously considered harmless. Ann. Emerg. Med. 32:739-741.

*** common spider was misidentified as a brown recluse by doctor***

 

Vetter, R. S. and P. K. Visscher.  1998.  Bites and stings of medically important venomous arthropods. Intl. J. Dermatol. 37:481-496