Email Photos of Spider Bites – Are they Real?
Many people have been circulating a series of images showing a terrible bite with the skin deteriorating to the bone claiming the injury to be a brown recluse spider bite. An expert offers the following: It is possible that the wound did result from a recluse bite. However, a number of aspects of this story are pretty suspicious, and have the classic symptoms of a hoax. No one can seem to verify where the alleged bite occurred, whether a spider was caught in the act of biting or at the scene of the crime, whether the victim was tested for additional etiologic agents of necrosis such as bacterial infection, if a doctor actually made the diagnosis or it was a self-diagnosis from the victim, if the diagnosis came from an area of the country that actually has brown recluses, etc. Some versions of this have included a picture of a spider that was supposed THE spider that caused the wound. Not so. It is a stock photo from an Ohio university website.
