[DaughterofEve]

Symptoms include:
"swollen welt and necrosis, or destruction of the tissue surrounding the bite, making the flesh black. "

This is very odd...I certainly hope they are testing for anthrax as well!

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

If its a recluse thats the symptoms alright !

[The Great Satan]

This is what cutaneous anthrax looks like.

[kcvl]

Bite Symptoms
The severity of a person's reaction to the bite depends on the amount of venom injected and individual sensitivity to it. Bite effects may be nothing at all, immediate or delayed. Some may not be aware of the bite for 2 to 8 hours, whereas others feel a stinging sensation usually followed by intense pain if there is a severe reaction. A small white blister usually rises at the bite site surrounded by a large congested and swollen area. Within 24 to 36 hours, a systemic reaction may occur with the victim characterized by restlessness, fever, chills, nausea, weakness and joint pain. The affected area enlarges, becomes inflamed and the tissue is hard to the touch. The spider's venom contains an enzyme that destroys cell membranes in the wound area with affected tissue gradually sloughing away, exposing underlying tissues. Within 24 hours, the bite site can erupt into a "volcano lesion" (a hole in the flesh due to damaged, gangrenous tissue).

The open wound may range from the size of an adult's thumbnail to the span of a hand. The sunken, ulcerating sore may heal slowly up to 6 to 8 weeks. Full recovery may take several months and scarring may remain. Plastic surgery and skin grafts are sometimes required.

[Uni-Poster]

Are the victims related, same house, neighborhood, work together, any connection at all?

[per loin]

Very odd in several ways. No past history of the spider there, but the bites apparently occurred in widely separated areas of the island. Has some more common insect been modified to produce the poison?

[xJones]

Brown recluses are serious little buggers. We have them in Texas and one bite will put you in the hospital. And your skin does rot around the wound.

[kcvl]

Day 1

Day 3

Day 9

[ex-Texan]

The Hobo Spider is more dangerous than the Brown Recluse.

This is One Big Ugly Spider

View Report

[CDHart]

How close is this to Plum Island?

Carolyn

[DoctorMichael]

Given the amount of GLOBAL WARMING currently going on, many animals will extend their 'range' northward. It doesn't surprise me to see this southern pest appear in the north.

Of course, once the polar ice-caps melt, flooding Long Island, the people there won't have to worry about this threat.

;-)

[4Freedom]

Any chance of these critters migrating to Chappaqua? Just a little wishful thinking, I guess.

[TADSLOS]

My wife was bitten by a spider (presumably a brown recluse) while sleeping in bed about 2 months ago. It bit her on the outside corner of her left eye, swelling her eye shut for a couple of weeks and making a black, baseball sized bruise mark, that has just recently healed leaving a small, deep scar. It looked pretty ugly, requiring a hospital visit and medication. I got a lot of mean stares from people for awhile, because it looked like she had been punched in the face.

Just this week, she saw a three inch long scorpion making its way up my sock as I was sitting on the couch. I never felt it, but quickly brushed it away without getting stung (I'm allergic) and killed it with my shoe. Ah, Texas in the summer....

[jordan8]

I was bitten by a brown recluse when I were a lad. My sister has been bitten twice. Not that big a deal if you are older than a small child. It raised a half-hens egg sized lump on my arm that had a volcano-like crater in the center that lasted a good while and oozed really cool pus when you squeezed it.

[Clara Lou]

My son has a suggestion as to the origins of these spiders' arrival on Long Island. As a teen he worked in produce in a grocery store here. He said that they occasionally got all sorts of insects in the produce. He said there were numerous varieties of spiders and insects-- a huge black widow, for one. Why not a brown recluse that managed to over-winter in L. I. and reproduce?

[Spunky]

Known to live in the Pacific Northwest from Washington east to Montana and south through Oregon and northern Utah, Maybe this one hitched a ride to Long Island. ;-)

The hobo spider, Tegenaria agrestis, is a European immigrant that has only recently (1980s) been implicated as a potentially poisonous spider in the United States. Other names used for this spider include the aggressive house spider (although this spider is not usually aggressive) and, less commonly, the Walckenaer spider and the Northwestern brown spider. However, in seeking name stability, the American Arachnological Society has chosen "hobo spider" as the spider’s official common name. The name "hobo" is linked to the spider’s presumed spread to distant cities via the railways.

Hobo spiders have been reported to have a bite that can leave a necrotic (i.e., rotting flesh) wound that progresses over several days—similar to that caused by a brown recluse bite. Another reported characteristic symptom of hobo spider bites is a headache that persists for 2 to 7 days and does not abate with analgesics.

[Dan(9698)]

Spiders in Wyoming are not just suspcious. --- They are cynical.

[medved]

Sounds like another problem made to order for DDT.

H.L.Mencken had a plan to end prohibition which would have worked had the govt not wised up and ended it when it did. Mencken put himself through the standard beer-brewing course in Germany at his own expense and was proceeding to teach five of his friends on condition that each of them teach five of THEIR friends, on condition that...

Somebody needs to do the same thing with DDT.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Bio-warfare?

[cgk]

This is exactly what happened to my husband the week AFTER Sept. 11th, after coming back from Big Sur, CA. We went to the hospital after it got worse (within 24 hours), and the admitting nurse (male) said it "could be anthrax". They did not do a blood test, though I requested one, to check for anything it could be, including anthrax antibodies.

We called, and were VISITED by & called by: poison control, the CDC, the FBI in both LA & SF, Special Agents to the US Food & Drug Admin's Office of Criminal Investigations, Public Health Investigators.

Noone wanted to touch it. And noone said it was definitely a brown recluse bite (apparently rare out here), or a Black Widow bite. They looked at it, asked if my husband had been around farm animals, received any strange letters, and then stopped all contact. We self-medicated him with Zithromax, and it took 2 rounds of meds for the lesion itself to go away. He still has a scar from it.

I was bitten by a brown recluse spider in Florida several years back. No question about it, being that I had the dead spider and all. My symptoms were nowhere near as severe as my husband's. He had every symptom of cutaneous anthrax exposure, for several MONTHS (not including the lesion). And not ONE person said he did NOT have antrax exposure, just that they couldn't "rule anything out".

We posted this mess here on FR, but I am having a hard time finding the whole long post from October.

Mrs K

[First_Salute]

Speaking of spiders.