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Battling the Brown Recluse With Innovation
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12159 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1994 |
2,593 Words |
| Author
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James Morelli
James Morelli is a writer, pharmacist, and certified poison
information specialist in Atlanta. |
On a chilly December day, a Christmas tree made of aluminum pie plates rattles furiously in the toy-littered yard of a north Georgia home. A dog hobbles among the wreckage, his feeble bellow adding a mournful sound.
But while the wind sweeps through a hundred cracks in the house he guards, the depths of a closet are quiet and warn. This is brown recluse country: Behind a shoe box filled with cigarette coupons, under a pair of old shoes, in the pocket of a forgotten jacket; the brown recluse spider hides in the darkest corners of the human habitat.
And like a gun-toting hillbilly determined to live as he pleases, the spider attacks at the slightest hint of trespass. Most times, you never know you've been hit. The recluse sinks its fangs painlessly into the tissue, then scampers away on long, bare legs, as if afraid to see what follows.
What follows is pain. Within hours, intense pain throbs about the bite as it splits into three zones: a central, blue-black blister about the size of a pencil eraser; surrounded by a one-to two-inch ring of swelling; and a three-to five-inch halo of redness stretching further out. It looks like a bull's-eye.
Think of the dead-colored center of the bite as an iceberg. The spider's venom sinks deep into the ocean of tissue and spreads, tightening blood flow to the damaged area and disabling the body's ability to detoxify the poison. Defenseless, the tissue dies.
It was the dead tissue that led Dr. Fled Svendsen, then practicing medicine at St. Vincent Infirmary in Little Rock, Arkansas, to test the effectiveness of hyperbaric oxygen on a brown recluse bite in 1984. Knowing hyperbaric oxygen stopped the spread of gangrene, Dr. Svendsen reasoned that it should work for brown recluse bites as well.
He found his study subject a few feet away. "It was sort of a fluke. The emergency room secretary had a brown recluse bite on her leg that wasn't responding to other treatments. She had antibiotics and cortisone, and still it was getting worse." Dr. Svendsen suggested she spend a few hours in St. Vincent's new hyperbaric chamber.
It produced stunning results. Within two days, the wound got better. Nine years and more than 200 patients later, St. Vincent reports only a 2-percent failure rate for brown recluse bites treated with
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