AUSTRALIAN SPIDERS

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 August 1933, Page 11

AUSTRALIAN SPIDERS

, DANGER TO HUMAN LIFE. SYDNEY, July 27. Between 1927 and 1932, 10 people in New South Wales died from snake bites and seven from spider bites. The most deadly spider, Mr A. H. Curlewis told the Workers’ Compensation Commission yesteiday, the funnel web species. It is confined to a small area of> the state - Mr Curlewis declared that poison from a spider bite was as great a menace as snake bite. He quoted cases in support of his contention. A child of two yeans, he said, had died an hour and a half after being bitten by the Atrax robustus variety. A five-year-old girl, a woman aged 47, and another aged 26, had died after being bitten—the child after an hour and a quarter, and the women aftei 11 and 13 hours respectively. Toxic spider bite, Mr Curlewis explained, was a disease of late summer and autumn. The poison glands ot a spider enlarge greatly during the breeding season. Eight per cent. o£ poison spider bites, he said, were on the hand, 8 per cent on the arm, 5 per cent, each oil the head, thigh, foot, and leg, and 64 per cent, on other parts of the body. . Mr Curlewis obtained his information from an article by Dr W. Wilson Ingram, of Sydney, in the Medical Journal of Australia of July 1, 1933.