Poisonous animal bites in Spain: cause for alarm or just a precaution?

Writing / Irene Vega

The study arose from the authors' concern to contrast the news about the danger of spiders and to assess the medical importance of bites with objective data. Fernando Cortés-Fossati and Marcos Méndez, researchers from the Biodiversity and Conservation Area of ​​the Rey Juan Carlos University, analyzed the data from the Health Information Institute of the Ministry of Health between the years 1997-2020 and compared these figures with those due to poisonings caused by other toxic terrestrial animals such as snakes, hymenoptera (bees and wasps) or scorpions.

The work has been published recently in the international journal Journal of Medical Entomology, which has highlighted it on its cover, and it is the first study in Spain on the number of spider bites requiring hospital care.

The results of this research largely refute the popular perception of the dangers of spiders and other animals. For every million Spanish inhabitants, only 1,23 cases of poisoning from bites or stings by toxic animals that lead to hospital care occur each year, of which the majority are not worrying. Specifically, for spiders only 59 cases were recorded in the 23 years covered by the study, most of them mild. “This figure is very probably overestimated, since in many cases other types of injuries are wrongly diagnosed as bites or stings from animals,” says Fernando Cortés-Fossati. 

Even less common were fatal cases, which were extremely rare and limited especially to elderly people. Thus, only 16 fatal cases have been recorded in the more than 20 years included in the study, mainly caused by anaphylactic shocks resulting from stings by bees, wasps and related species. No deaths were recorded from spider bites, scorpion bites or centipede bites, and none from native snakes.

The authors point out that “this work aims to focus especially on the view that people have of spiders. The results highlight the need to raise awareness among citizens about the need to understand and hold them in high regard, rather than fear them, and that the reliability of sensationalist information offered by the media and networks should be taken with a very critical eye. In addition to not constituting any serious risk to the health of people in Spain, spiders perform a fundamental role as insect predators, without which society would not be able to enjoy the state of well-being that it presents.”