» The official BROWN RECLUSE SPIDER - TREATMENT

Avoid any of the following:

o HEAT : Keep injury safe from it (heat accelerates tissue destruction).
o Hydrocortisone cream or other steroids are forbidden.
o Do not try to remove the brown recluse spider venom with cuts or using suction devices.

The medical treatment of the brown recluse spider bite consists of Tetanus immunization, Pain relievers, and proper medication as antibiotics and antihistamines.

For long readers: The most dangerous bites are from the “Recluse Loxosceles” of North America and the “Laeta Loxosceles” of South America. The poison contains enzymes that are also part of the snake’s family poison such as: hialuronidasa, fosfolipasa, fosfohidrolasa, esterase, alkaline fosfatasa and protease. There are some differences in the poison among the species and there are also differences that concern the quantity of poison that the species inject, this makes the clinic cases to go from slight to serious levels: the serious cases of dermatonecrosis and coagulopatias are weird and not common; the death cases are rarely seen and children are the victims of them. However this spider has a very popular fame since many people with serious damages on their skin needed grafts and plastic surgeries; Some children even lost important facial parts.

Recluses Bites

The Recluses bites are, often, located in the inferior members. These spiders tend to bite only the people who messes with them. The bites on faces and hands are also very common in human beings. Generally, the bite is painless and its consequences appear later and are not related to the bite of the spider. It can also cause local pain or stinging, followed by a blister surrounded by swollen skin which size is between 1 and 2 cm. The pain can be slight at the beginning and increase with time. The apparition of a blue halo around the injury may suggest loxocelismo, indicating hemólisis or cianosis. Later, it turns into a small damage stretched along the skin and is also very deep. The ulcer can grow as wide as 20 cm (8 inches) and it’s covered by a crust. If this happens, it will need plastic surgery with the aim of replacing the skin with grafts. In the most serious cases there may be high temperature, muscles pain and a hemolytic anemia with hemoglobinuria (red urine), it can also be followed by kidneys insufficiency. We can add to this case hemorrhages due to the consume of the blood coagulation facts, it’s seen only in a 10% of the cases, mainly in kids and old people. In this situation the mortality is around 25%.

Preventive treatment

The diagnosis of the recluses bites is not easy, since the contact with the spider can be ignored if it hasn’t been seen, the firsts symptoms don’t help the treatment since at the beginning the damage doesn’t seem serious, and it takes hours even days to see the real problem. The things we can do to solve this problem are not so many, one of them is to get the diagnosis quickly and isolate the patient, since if he/she is taken to hospital in the first 8 hours it will be possible to extract the wound with surgery, after the 8 hours the injury gets worse and bigger. But as we said at the beginning, the diagnosis is not easy to be determined, even in hospitals.

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