8-Year-Old 'Spider-Man' Fan Lets Black Widow Bite Him
An 8-year-old boy unknowingly placed himself in a very dangerous situation when he let a black widow spider bite him. The child hoped that the bite would turn him into Spider-Man, the superhero he is a big fan of.
In the fictional character's origin story, a boy named Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider and gets superpowers, becoming Spider-Man. There have been many different Spider-Man movies and other media recently that are extremely popular with young kids.
The spider bite incident happened recently in the town of Vichuloma, which is in Bolivia, as reported by the Spanish news agency EFE, via Newsweek.
The little boy found the spider under a rock, and once he saw the characteristic red markings on the underside of the arachnid, he took it into his hand and let it bite him, thinking that it would give him superpowers, as recounted by Ernesto Vásquez, head of the Zoonotic Diseases Program of the Departmental Health Service of Oruro.
He said, "The child, without considering the risks, picked it up [and] placed it on the back of his palm where the arachnid made the bite."
The boy captured the spider in a glass and went home, and a few hours later he started feeling symptoms, including body aches and muscle contractions. When his mother asked what happened, the boy said that he was bitten by a colorful spider.
After a visit to a nearby health center, he was sent to the Hospital General San Juan de Dios in the city of Oruro, which then contacted Vásquez. They quickly figured out that it was a black widow that bit the boy and treated him with the anti-venom. The boy stabilized and recovered.
Vásquez told EFE, "We are extremely concerned because the analysis and questions asked to the child when he had already recovered indicate that he picked up the arachnid with a simple purpose—that he wanted to become Spider-Man."
A similar incident happened in 2020 in Bolivia, with three boys in the town of Chayanta getting bitten by a black widow for the goal of turning into a superhero, unaware of the true risks. They were successfully treated as well.
According to Healthline, black widow spider bites can cause nausea, difficulty breathing, pain that's not limited to the bite site, chills, a fever, and more. In serious cases, they can cause seizures and death, and young people, the elderly, and the immunocompromised are the most vulnerable.
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