Deaths from spider bites - again

The Snark

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Just an annual reiteration of the usual blowfest. Keeping things in context.

Deaths from:
Latrodectus - all. In the US; none. World Wide; 3
Loxosceles - all. In the US; 1. World wide; unknown but estimated less than 10
Phoneutria - all. In the US; none. World wide; 10 reported in Brazil
Atrax - Hexathalids. In the US; none. World wide; none since 1981
All other spiders. In the US; none. World wide; unknown but none directly attributed.

Motor vehicle related. In the US; 37,000 per year, 101 per day. World Wide; 1,300,000 per year, 3,287 per day..
 

AphonopelmaTX

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Makes one wonder if the number of deaths from the spider taxa listed here would increase if the same number of people interacted with them as often as motor vehicles.
 

The Snark

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I assume these statistics are from 2015?
Yes, the most recent, though the motor vehicle stats are probably 15%-40% low as a number of countries only report government ran/operated/financed hospital data. Non fatal injury reporting is even worse with a range of 20,000,000 to 80,000,000 per year.
 

The Snark

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Makes one wonder if the number of deaths from the spider taxa listed here would increase if the same number of people interacted with them as often as motor vehicles.
Can you imagine what the news would be like if every motor vehicle accident received the same media blitz that spider bites does?
 

The Snark

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Makes one wonder if the number of deaths from the spider taxa listed here would increase if the same number of people interacted with them as often as motor vehicles.
It aptly demonstrates humans are beset on all sides by deadly perils and spiders are failing miserably to contribute to the carnage.
 

Chris LXXIX

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Deaths from:
Latrodectus - all. In the US; none. World Wide; 3
If you want to add the people bitten here in Italy by L.tredecimguttatus during '88 to '93 in Liguria region i can search for you something. Officially 'Docs' said the spider was the culprit (those people were bitten, however) but who knows if secondary issues didn't jumped in.
I don't remember now if they were four, or five, fatalities anyway. Need to resume that, because i was a kid back then.
 

The Snark

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WHO and other entities only use pathological findings for cause of death. Emergency room surmises by physicians and so on do not count. The pathological determination is very exacting. With envenomations it must conclude that the venom was the predominant factor etc taking into account the trend as biological death progressed.
For example, the three deaths attributed to Latrodectus took into account the patients were in poor health and susceptible but the venom was the predominant contributive factor that caused the cardiac arrest.
Venom degrading the patients health is contributive but not necessarily the predominant factor.
 
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Mossae

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This proves one thing to me, obviously motor vehicles should be illegal xD
 

The Snark

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It occurred to me this morning that most people don't know, don't understand, how venoms and poisons effect humans. They think of a bite from an animal with a medically significant venom is like a bullet from a gun. The bio-mechanical workings of a venom are not massive trauma compromising a vital organ. All the functions of a venom involve a complex chain of events, receptors, alterations of physiological functions in a domino effect and so on.

For example, most people think an antibiotic directly poisons the problem bacteria. It doesn't. It interrupts a critical event in the bacterium life cycle a given percentage of the time. The same applies to venoms in an animals body.

Additionally, people think with a bite a venom will be found in the body like a bullet from a gun. In reality, venoms are virtually impossible to detect. It takes an extensive series of lab tests of numerous biological functions and variations of these functions. Enough variations fitting into a series of profilles end up being attributed to the presence of a given toxin.
IE no smoking gun, no bullet, and dozens upon dozens of lab tests that are never absolute and can take days or weeks to produce meaningful results. And at the end of all the tests, nearly all diagnosis ends up having the word 'suspected' or 'probable' attached.
 
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