|A Spider With Your Grapes?|
April 13, 2004|
It has a shiny, brown or black body, eight legs, and a red hourglass on its abdomen. Add a venom that poisons the nervous system and you have a black widow spider.
A black widow spider is not something you would want to find as you munch on a bunch of grapes, but that is exactly what has happened to several people over the past few months. The spiders eat pests (insects) that affect the fruit in grape fields. Some people are blaming the reduced use of pesticides for the increased number of encounters with spiders by the public.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency released a fact sheet with safety tips should you find a black widow spider in your grapes. They recommend:
|Did you know?||The neurotoxin in black widow spider
venom is called latrotoxin. Latrotoxin works by
causing the release of the neurotransmitter called acetylcholine.
Symptoms of a black widow spider bite include pain, swelling, nausea,
sweating and breathing problems. Although people can be killed by such a
bite, most people recover within a few days.|
Treatment of a black widow spider bite: the National Institutes of Health suggests that ice should be placed on the site of the bite in a cycle of 10 minutes on/10 minutes off and that the victim should visit a doctor immediately.
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