If you thought you saw many of them in Berkley, CA, where they do not live, I’m afraid I would have to question your spider sense in other states.
(Sorry, but sick of every little brown spider being declared a brown recluse and righteously smashed, and every unexplained pustule on a leg being diagnosed as from one of their bites. That guy’s hyperventilation may be cranked up to 11 but its because the misinformation about those spiders is at about 25.)
Bull’s eye effect suggests deer tick with Lyme disease potential, so I’d get it checked out.
The article is informative re: spiders, but now I want to know more about MRSA. Does it often cause skin problems? Doesn’t it do other things? What specifically makes it MRSA rather than ordinary staph?
See also Kate Beaton’s amusing take at http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=308 .
The difference between MRSA and normal Staph is that normal Staph responds to antibiotics and is thus much easier to treat.
Of course. But if you’re looking at a “spider bite” that no one has even tried to treat, why would one promptly label it MRSA? Aren’t hastily-applied labels part of the problem here?
Perhaps, but bites by Loxosceles reclusa can result in necrotizing lesions that become secondarily infected by bacteria including MRSA. The latter’s presence does not exclude an arthropod assault. Examine carefully the squished bug your patient brings in and tells you it bit him there, pointing to a gaping pustulous wound.
Yeah - that’s not a brown recluse. They don’t get nearly that large. That one doesn’t have the dark mark on its back.
Oh a desert recluse. I stand corrected. We don’t have those near here. The regular brown recluse gets only about an inch. I’ve caught dozens in sticky traps.
" Insecticides often fail to kill the spider, instead intoxicating its nervous system and inducing aggressive behavior"
Oh, great.
I smell a SyFy movie!
Interesting. I’m now trying to decide if my fear of MRSA is bigger than my fear of spiders. I always feel so guilty and horrible when I see cute cartoon spiders. I’m sorry I’m so afraid of you!
My dad was bitten by a spider on a job site. (Yeah, it really was a spider and we know because he saw/smashed it. However the smashing prevented any real identification.) My dad being the kind of guy he was, he did not go to a doctor even after the bite got infected and became painful. His best friend’s wife was a nurse, and agreed to look at it at my mother’s request. (The yelling, oh I remember the yelling.) Whether it was something super poisonous or the wound became infected with MRSA later I have no idea. It ended up being a horrific, necrotic wound that would leave a weird, crater scar.
And I bet he still did not go to the doctors after that.
Seriously. One time he walked around a broken leg all weekend and put up a fight when we wanted to take him to the ER. He was on a hunting trip and drunk, which is how he fell out of a bunk bed and fractured the bone in the first place. Walking around, killing a deer and hauling it back worsened the problem. It was ridiculous.
“and occasionally massively stimulating their growth hormones.”
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