White tail spider bites

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Originally Posted by amtravic1

I find it interesting that some people on here refuse to believe others about the effects of a white tail spider bite.

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I think you are missing the point of my comments (and NM's and several others if I have read them correctly).
I don't think anyone is refusing to believe that a white-tailed spider bite can be nasty.
However there is some sort of myth that says that if you are bitten by a wts, the effects will be nasty and that it is the only spider bite that has that effect.

It is easy to see how such a myth develops. Once the wts gets a bit of a reputation, if someone is bitten by something and it turns nasty, the assumption is that it must have been a wts. If it doesn't get infected, the assumption is that it wasn't a wts. So before long, there are an enormous number of anecdotal reports of wts bites causing all sorts of problems when in fact the majority of them were not a wts bite.

How do you explain the fact that when a careful study of 130 wts bites was done, the effects of the bites were not as disastrous as people assume they will be?

The situation as I see it (from listening to people's stories and reading information from medical sources)

• Any bite or injury can be a problem.
• Some people bitten by a white-tailed spider will experience nasty symptoms.
• Some people bitten by other things will experience nasty symptoms.
• Some bites don't cause any serious effects.
• Some people bitten by a white-tailed spider will not have serious symptoms.
• Some people bitten by other things will not have serious symptoms.

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Originally Posted by vnx205

I think you are missing the point of my comments

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The situation as I see it (from listening to people's stories and reading information from medical sources)

• Any bite or injury can be a problem.
• Some people bitten by a white-tailed spider will experience nasty symptoms.
• Some people bitten by other things will experience nasty symptoms.
• Some bites don't cause any serious effects.
• Some people bitten by a white-tailed spider will not have serious symptoms.
• Some people bitten by other things will not have serious symptoms.

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I think that there is a major absence in your list and NM tried to explain it.

• Some people are bitten by a spider that IS NOT a WTS, but wrongly accuse the WTS of the bite.

Unless you are an arachnologist (zoologist who specialises in spiders) and have the actual spider that did the biting in an undamaged condition, the best that you can say is that I was bitten by a spider. If you saw the spider you could go one step further as say it was probably a WTS.

In reality what matters is that for spider bites, the wound and condition are identified/monitored and the the treatment based upon that, including anti-venom if warranted.

I don't know what a WTS bite is like. Never had one bite me. Only even had one spider bite all I can say is that it disintergrated on impact with my hand. It did make me sick for 2 days.

Having read all the posts, Let me tell you about a very good friend of mine, true story

He changed out of his overalls and put his pants on after comming in from the shed and felt something stinging his leg. Instictivly he squashed what ever it was and continued. After a short while, he started to feel rather bad, sick, and could not get hold of his Dr. He then rang his son to come and pick him up. His son came and took his father home to have a shower before going to the hospital / Dr. In the mean time someone finally got hold of the Dr. who came out to the house straight away. (He happened to be in the area.) The Dr. took one look at the old bloke, said he is going to hospital NOW!! No ambulance, no time, I'll take him in my car. Got him to hospital, he actually died, but they managed to bring him back. The Dr. said it was a white tailed spider, They found the squashed remains inside his trouser leg. It took about 18 months to heal and he now has a very nasty scar on his leg.

Like it was said before, you have to be aware that we are all diferent, and react in different ways to the same situation. Also we have to be sure that it actually was a, white tailed spider, redback, X snake, or whatever. In this case the medical staff identified the spider, so I would have no doubt in believing them.

Whilst some people are lucky enough not to have any reactions, others are not.

The above story does not imply that all WTS bites are deadly, nor does it mean that we should place the bite of the WTS in the same catogory as Mozzies. Just that caution should be used after being bitten or stung by anything

This has become an interesting healthy debate!

Well I had no sickness as such but the bite its self is still noticeable (Smallish lump) but not at irritating me at this stage.

Tony

Not only do different people react differently. We can't even be sure that the same person will have the same reaction every time.

My reason for saying that is my own experience with bee stings. I know some people who have become sensitised so that an untreated bee sting could be fatal.

I had the opposite experience (so far).

As a young kid I was forever stepping on bees. We had clover in our lawn, we never wore shoes and Dad always had a few bee hives around the place.

Just about every time I was stung on the foot, my whole lower leg would swell up, the skin would feel tight as a drum and would be terribly itchy.

When I was a teenager, I was helping Dad move a hive one night and I accidentally bumped the steel plate we had blocking he entrance. The bees were not happy and by the time I was able to set the hive down, I had been stung 14 times. I had almost no reaction, certainly much less than I used to have from one sting a few years before.

About a decade later, I was stung on the neck while riding my motorbike. I had visions of my throat swelling up and suffocating me. Once again, there was no reaction.

My last bee sting was only a week ago. It stung a bit for a few hours and was itchy for a day or so, but there was no swelling.

The last ten or twenty stings have been like that; very little reaction and nothing like the reaction I had from probably all of the dozens of stings I had when I was primary school age.

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Originally Posted by Numpty's Missus

What makes me so sure of what?

there is no way you could know?

Or no way you could know it was a white tailed spider bite?

or no way your GP could be wrong?

as for sources....you've got a few from others already...do you need them repeated? or should I go do some research for you (which you could easily do yourself if you felt like it) to prove my point?

No...sorry but I don't feel I need to
It is OK for you to believe whatever you like
and I will do likewise eh?

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it was assessed by the doctor as a whitetail bite. If the doctor says so then there is no reason to dispute it.
It's a bit presumptuous of you to say it wasn't considering you haven't been bitten, didn't see her bite and don't know the doctor OR the amount of recorded bites where we are.
What if it wasn't assessed as a whitetail and something did go wrong and ended up in hospital from an allergic reaction????
I am not asking you to prove your point, The whole reason she posted the note was to put in her 2 cents on the experience, not to be told by someone who hasn't suffered the excruciating pain that she is wrong and can't be sure.

Maybe you need the experience of a bite as does anybody who has an opinion about anything from the armchair perspective.

LMR

I don't think anyone is disputing that Mrs LMR suffered greatly and that things could have been a great deal worse if she had not been treated fairly promptly.

However, without wishing to sound as if I am questioning your doctor's honesty, experience or competence, I believe that this could still be one of those cases where a white-tailed spider was blamed even though it might have been some other spider.

It would not be the first time a doctor told a patient something that the patient wanted to hear. I'm sure a lot of doctors would believe that their patient is more likely to treat the bite seriously if they believe that they have been bitten by a white-tailed spider, so it is a convenient explanation to offer the patient. Doing that does not make your doctor dishonest or incompetent. It is just a way of getting the message across that the bite should be taken seriously. However I'm sure Mrs LMR was already convinced that she should take it seriously.

Of course I don't know your doctor; I don't know his impression of Mrs LMR's understanding of medicine and arachnids; I don't know a whole lot of things about this particular incident. However like at least one other person, I can see that it is possible that this might be another case of the white-tailed spider getting the blame for something it did not do.

It is a fairly automatic assumption on a lot of people's part that if the bit goes nasty, it must have been a white-tailed spider. I can quite understand that a quite competent, caring doctor who has only the bite and the symptoms to go by would find it convenient to identify the spider as a white-tailed spider.

Maybe it was; your doctor may have been right, but I don't accept this case as a 100% certain identification of a white-tailed spider.

Just in case you missed it further up, I say that while still having enormous sympathy for Mrs LMR and the greatest respect for your doctor.

I'm a proffesional pesty, yes they bite, yes it can be nasty! worst thing about them is they are aggresive, they tend to get you in the bed as they are nochternal hunters. Get the house treated by a COMPETENT pesty. If you are in the canberra area PM me and I will help you out.

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Originally Posted by Numpty's Missus

Nope!!

Sorry Mrs LMR but unless you saw the spider and actually got it identified there is no way you can say, it was without a doubt, a white tailed spider. Nor can your doctor.

I have also seen tick bites end up necrosed and requiring surgical debridement and hospitilisation ;)

There are many things that could have bitten you

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My god if nothing else you baffle everyone with big words.I've had to get one of the nurses in my family to decode all that
Disco 44