About 450 of these were large enough to cause envenomations, they saw brown recluses crawling all over the house, the walls, the carpet, in the sinks and bathtub, yet in 8 years of occupancy of that house (as of Sept 2004), no person or their multitude of pets has ever shown evidence of a bite (Vetter and Barger, Journal of Medical Entomology, volume 39, pages 948-951, 2002). For example, a family of 4 in Lenexa, Kansas collected 2,055 brown recluse spiders in their house in 6 months. When one finds a habitat that is conducive to recluse spider survival, no matter what the species, one does not find single specimens one finds dozens of them. People just WANT to blame spiders when there are lots of more probable things that cause necrotic injuries (see below). When people hear that there are no recluse spiders in their area, many immediately switch to hobo spiders or yellow sac spiders as their "recluse du jour", but the solid evidence of those spiders being involved is also lacking. However, occurrences outside the native areas are still extremely rare and they typically encompass finds of single specimens only, not burgeoning populations of these spiders. Occasional, RARE occurrences of the brown recluse do occur outside this region because of the spider's proclivity to hide in boxes and the subsequent movement of possessions or commerce from its native area. ( see distribution map) The members of the genus Loxosceles are known as recluse, violin or fiddleback spiders. deserts from Texas to California however, they do not inhabit the coastal California regions where most of the human population is concentrated. In addition there are several related species that exist in the southwestern U.S. This is in spite of the fact that the brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa) is native only to the South and central midwestern states (circumscribed by southeastern Nebraska south to Texas, east to Georgia/westernmost tip of South Carolina and southernmost Ohio with additional rare finds being made beyond this area). In the case of necrotic wounds, "brown recluse spider bite" is a very common conclusion of medical personnel throughout North America including such ludicrously inhospitable places as Canada and Alaska where no brown recluses have ever been found.
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"Potential spider bite" diagnoses are made solely on the symptoms of the lesion.
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In virtually every case, NO spider is seen nor felt inflicting a bite, nor is the alleged spider collected in the incident. Throughout the United States, spiders get blamed as the cause of many dermatological wounds in medical diagnoses. Causes of Necrotic Wounds other than Brown Recluse Spider Bites