A woman in Waterford was recently hospitalised for six days following a spider bite.
News emerged on Wednesday that a
woman in Waterford had spent six days in hospital after she was bitten by a False Black Widow spider.
Since then, an appeal has been issued by Doctor Michel Dugon, principal investigator of the Venom Systems Lab at NUIG.
Dugon, speaking to
RTÉ on Thursday, he said that this type of spider has been reported in at least 18 counties in Ireland, and he urged anyone who feels they may have been bitten to
contact his laboratory.
He also said that a bite from this type of spider can be quite sore:
"It seems from the cases that we've studied so far that the bite is actually fairly painful.
"Most victims say that very quickly after the bite, they felt a very sharp and intense pain. In most cases, victims will complain of fairly mellow symptoms, but we do have some patients who complain of swelling, goosebumps, chills, sweats and fever."
He did however stress that bite from a False Widow has not killed anyone as far as he is aware, and that they only bite when they feel threatened.
Speaking on
Deise Today with Damien Tiernan on WLR FM on Thursday, Maria Condon explained how she was bitten three times by the spider and that she'd discovered a nest of them in her house.
"I got bit by one on the leg, it actually bit me three times in my house," she said. "I was in the sitting room and I felt a bite under my jeans and when I pulled up the leg of my trousers I saw a spider run up my leg.
"Then it bit again. I knocked it off my leg but I got three bites from it.
"It burned like hell. It was like boiling water. Within a couple of minutes, big water blisters began forming where I had been bit."
