» The official BROWN RECLUSE SPIDER - BITE

The BRS has a powerful poison and occasionally bites a human causing skin lesions (local injuries) and sometimes more common symptoms. These symptoms depend on the inoculate (amount) of the poison and the sensitivity of each individual.
Initially, the bite is painless to the point of the victim being completly unaware of it, but soon begins to manifest itself after a few hours with a variety of symptoms.

One of the bite’s characteristic is a hard and sharping sensation on the skin, followed by an intense pain and swollen skin. At the beginning we can’t see this when the injury is local, but in the firsts hours we notice the skin turning red, and after the first day this injury changes the coulour into purple, and is there when the typical injury called “livedoide plaque” appears.

There are two types of poison cicles of this corner spider, the one called skin Loxoscelim and the skin visceral. The most common of these two is the skin Loxoscelim ( 85 %), in where the previous described injury evolves with the time into a necrotica plaque, with general symptoms. Althouhg the patient’s life doesn’t run any risk, he/she will certainly get a scar on the bite’s area. The Physiopathology is a consequence of the poison action in the small vessels of the skin.

The second clinic cicle is the skin- visceral Loxoscelismo (Fig 10), here the patient presents general symptoms all over the body: high temperature and, most important of all, blood in the urine, in macro or microscopic way. In these cases, the patient could achieve, quickly, deep kidney insufficiency which turns later into multiorganic insufficiency, this pathology can lead the patient to death (laxoscelismo mortality rate 1 to 3 %). These phenomenoms are mainly produced by the toxin action in the red corpuscles and the kidneys.

The more common question is: What makes the patient to present a skin cicle or a skin-visceral cicle?, unfortunately, this question hasn’t been answered yet. It is related to each’s person susceptibility towards a certain stimulus, something that remains in the genetic of everybody’s inmune system. What it is certain is that the cicles are more serious in children.

According to the treatment, we have many alternatives, in general the most important thing is to ask the patient about the episode, which allows the doctor to use the right medical treatment before the damage has been done. Besides, we can fin in drug stores an antidote widely used; however its utility is not still 100% effective, and that is why its use is still controversial; the patient has a lapse of 6 hours after the bite ocurred. It’s important to consider this antidote as an alternative mean of healing; it is not going to affect the patient in a vital way. It is available in the market and is worth a try, but we must remember that it is not a good example of good treatment.

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