Steve Quayle News Alerts

July 28, 2003
By Susan Jenks
FLORIDA TODAY

A rash of serious spider bites, possibly inflicted by the brown recluse spider, has kept the Brevard Regional Hyperbaric Center in Melbourne unusually busy this summer.

In less than a month, Dr. Paul Buza, a neurologist and the center's medical director, said he has treated three deep spider bites carrying the characteristic bull's-eye markings of these poisonous spiders.

The bite of the brown recluse is one of the most feared. Spiders bite when their dark, secluded spaces, such as attics or closets are invaded.

Buza said he has never seen so many deep bites in this short a period of time before.

"Most of the time, their bites are self-limiting," Buza said, meaning they heal on their own, with a little push from antibiotics to prevent infection.

But serious wounds show up "with something essentially white at the center, surrounded by a red ring of inflammation" and can -- as in one of the three cases -- pose the threat of limb amputation, he said. Oxygen treatments at Buza's center help the healing process for victims of spider bites.

Health officials and Buza say there generally are more spider bites this time of year because more people are out and about, increasing the odds of a chance encounter.

State officials, however, doubt the culprit of the recent bites is the brown recluse spider, which takes its name from its reclusive nature and is not native to Florida.

"The true incidence of these bites is not really what most people think it is. It's much lower," said Dawn Sollee, assistant director of the Florida Poison Information Center in Florida.

She said many species of spider, including Florida's only other venomous spider, the black widow, can cause bull's-eye lesions as well.

Even non-poisonous spiders, if their bites become infected, can cause ulceration and deep wounds, she said.

Frank Meyer, one of Buza's patients, expressed gratitude over oxygen's healing role in bringing his own wounded hand back to normal.

The West Melbourne resident said he doesn't remember being bitten by a spider, but looking back, he thinks it occurred while he was pulling apart a sprinkler pump in a "damp and dark area" of his garage.

Although there was no initial pain, within hours, his hand turned bright red, with red streaking up one side of his arm.

Once the swelling began, Meyer said, "there was a lot of pain. It makes you feel sluggish and slow." He also had a fever.

Meyer said he went to his family physician, who put him on antibiotics and sent him immediately to an orthopedic surgeon. The surgeon sent him to Buza without doing any cutting, he said.

The best way to surgically manage deep spider wounds remains controversial, Buza said, with some surgeons still cutting first, trying to stem the poison's progress.

But the use of oxygen to speed healing is a widely accepted practice.

Not only do daily oxygen treatments break apart the toxin or poison, "snapping it in half," but it increases the oxygen supply to "all those tissues starving for oxygen," Buza said.

On average, most serious spider bites require at least three to five treatments before there are signs of improvement, according to Buza.

Patients like Meyer go inside a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, where they receive 100 percent oxygen for about two hours.

"That's 10- to 15-fold more oxygen than we normally get," Buza said.

Just how many spider bites in Florida require extensive medical treatment is not a number the state tracks. Nor does the Brevard County Health Department.

"Spider bites are not reportable," said Dr. Heidar Heshmati, Brevard County's Health Director. "Even snakebites, we don't get any information on -- only for contagious diseases."

Residents should use reasonable precautions and employ standard pest-control measures, health experts said.

"Be careful if you're grabbing old clothes out of the attic, look in your shoes before putting them on, and don't stick your hands into piles of leaves," Buza said.

Recluse spiders are recognizable by their fiddle-back or violin marking and their brown color.

However, few people who are bitten catch the spider -- or even see it.

Michael Long, a Melbourne resident, never saw the spider that bit him, although he was told it was a brown recluse.

By the time he got to the emergency room, he said, his bite was the size of "the top of a coffee can" and the venom already had "started to decay the flesh."

"It was very unpleasant," he said, recalling the time during which the bite began to swell and throb.

Even now, after 10 oxygen treatments, the area is "tremendously sore to the touch," Long said.

The treatments have helped, though, he said.

Buza conceded that, without a biological confirmation, the spiders responsible for his patients' wounds will remain uncertain.

"But this is a real clinical phenomenon and it needs aggressive medical intervention," he said.

http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/localstoryA7290A.htm