Arachnolingo 2, part III: Medically significant, venomous, dangerous: Why should we care?

This is part 3 of an article that was so long it became a trilogy. You can click here for part one, about what "venomous" really means, and here for part two, about the term "medically significant", and how it differs from "venomous" and "dangerous".

"Venomous" and "poisonous" don't mean what most people think they mean. What most people actually mean when they use these words generally is "medically significant".

Does it matter that much, though? Is it that important to use "medically significant" instead? If that's what everyone understands when we say "venomous" or "poisonous", why not simply use them that way in everyday conversations, and keep the fancy talk for expert discussions only?

That would be a fair and valid point, if these words were not purposefully used in the wrong way by people who know exactly what they are doing, to scare and mislead their readers into fearing animals they don't need to be concerned about.

In the common language, the terms "venomous" and "poisonous" have an extremely negative connotation. They are associated with notions of danger, disease and even death. These words are scary, which is a big problem when they are used in misleading ways by the media. 

Joro spiders (Trichonephila clavata) are harmless to humans, and the author of this article is absolutely aware of it; the use of "venomous" in that title is purely for attention-grabbing purposes: it's true that they are venomous, but it doesn't mean what readers will think it means

The Internet, particularly since the beginning of the age of social media, has radically transformed (some might say "destroyed") journalism. Nowadays, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for newspapers. While some manage to keep a strong reader base despite charging a subscription fee, thanks to a reputation they had built before the online era, or rely on reader's donations, most have had no choice but to become free to read and find another source of funding: advertising. 

Not only do the "free" online newspapers serve as advertisement platforms, but they are also (and more importantly) used by advertisement companies to gather data about their readers, through cookies. The type of articles you click on is of high interest to advertisers, because it tells them about what you like, what you care about, but also what you're afraid of and what you hate; it allows them to know more about you and the rest of the population, and, ultimately, to know what to sell to us and how.
While it might make you angry to know that reading "free" online news helps marketing companies understand how to manipulate you into buying stuff, that's not exactly where the problem is. After all, you get your free news, the columnists get paid, advertisers get to do their job, and everyone wins, right?

The problem is, there's a LOT of free news outlets out there, competing against each other. And if their survival depends on advertising, that means the only value they have is as advertisement and data-harvesting platforms, not as an information outlet.
In other words, all that matters is the title's ability to attract as many readers as possible, in the most cost-effective way possible; providing good-quality or even merely accurate information is not a priority in that context. 
This has pushed otherwise "respectable" newspapers to stoop down to dubious methods formerly confined to the most disreputable tabloids: mass publishing hastily-written, poorly researched articles, riddled with misinformation and baseless speculation (sometimes even outright lies), with sensational, exaggeratedly alarmist titles distorting the facts, whose sole purpose is to bait potential readers at any cost. To achieve that, these titles and articles rely heavily on appeal to emotions, and no emotion works better in that purpose than fear.

Tabloids such as The Sun, The Daily Mail or the Mirror have had a long tradition of publishing sensationalistic articles with ridiculous titles and distorted, often dubious information, but unfortunately the trend has recently generalised to more "respectable" press

If there's one easy, safe (one that will not expose the journal to lawsuits from slandered individuals or human rights institutions) and effective topic to scare people into reading any crappy paper, it's spiders. Most people don't know much (and don't care much) about spiders, so no one will really check if what the article says is true or even plausible; and there's so many ridiculous urban legends already circulating about them that people will truly believe anything. While conveying fear and lies about events, people and communities and promoting hate is a dangerous game, spreading such falsehoods about spiders and other "scary" animals will achieve the same result, free of consequences.

Lately, the phenomenon has taken such proportions that scientists are now investigating the matter, and their findings are appalling: more than half (53%) of articles about spiders in the European press are sensationalistic, and the same proportion contains factual errors!
In North America and Oceania, 50% of press articles about spiders are sensationalistic, but journalists from Down Under seem more thorough in researching their topic than Americans, as only 26% of their articles contain errors, versus 43% in North America.
In South America and Asia, sensationalism seems much more limited, but errors are not (respectively 44 and 47% of articles are of sensationalistic nature, and 44% and 51% contain errors).
Africa is, by far, the most reasonable when it comes to spider media coverage, as it is the only continent where only a small minority of articles are sensationalistic (20%) and/or contain errors (28%). 

This article published by the BBC on the 27th of November 2023, claimed a wolf spider laid eggs in a British man's toe on a cruise near Marseille, France. The biologically impossible and obviously made-up story was conveyed by the journal, without the slightest attempt to verify it beforehand. It's only the next day that the BBC radically modified their article, making it clear it was the "victim" who claimed a spider (not seen or photographed) had laid eggs in his toe, and that experts contested it. Of course, in the meantime, tabloids in the UK and France had all shared the ridiculous tale...

This large-scale scaremongering makes life even more difficult for arachnophobes and causes unnecessary persecution of spiders, but the problems unfortunately don't stop there. Because of the recent media craze, the presence of harmless and/or ordinary spiders on premises sometimes causes evacuations and closures, and disrupts businesses' activity. They cause needless calls and interventions of emergency response services, mobilising resources which could (and should) be put to better use elsewhere. Of course, these interventions are, in turn, covered by the same media, which generally fail to underline their superfluous nature, leading readers to believe them appropriate and necessary, ultimately causing the phenomenon to happen more often.

In 2018, in Montpellier, France, seven classrooms of a school were closed for five days, and fumigated by pest control services, because of the presence of a few specimens of a large, but common, native and harmless species of wolf spider (Hogna radiata). This was not the first nor the only time harmless spiders caused such disproportionate panic and disruption, but the media coverage of these events generally does not picture the reactions as extreme or unreasonable, which keeps them happening.

The main issue, though, is the fact that this ridiculous press coverage adds to the already rampant problem of spider bite misdiagnosis*. Actual spider bites are rare, bites by medically significant spiders are even rarer, bites by medically significant spiders that lead to severe symptoms are extremely rare. However, spider bites, particularly necrotic spider bites, are a dangerously overdiagnosed medical entity. Many other pathogens, particularly bacteria, or circulatory problems, can cause lesions virtually identical to those caused by spider bites, while being much more common, and should always be considered more likely unless a spider was actually seen.
Because they are are a rare and minor medical problem, most physicians don't follow any in-depth training about spider bites, and their curriculum doesn't include any. That means that the average general practitioner actually does not know much about spiders, and their professional opinions are often tainted with hearsay and false beliefs. "When you hear the sound of hooves, think horses, not zebras" says the famous adage, but that can prove difficult when rumours and media all around you insist zebras are everywhere.
That creates a lot of situations where physicians blame unidentified (and unidentifiable) lesions on spiders; a "diagnosis" which is little more than a wild guess, reinforced by the false idea, conveyed by media and rumours, that spider bites are a common and likely cause of such lesions.
It creates an even greater number of situations where laypeople, finding a random boil on their skin, directly assume the cause was a spider.
The thing is, skin necrosis isn't exactly a benign condition, and misidentification of lesions as spider bites causes delayed or inappropriate treatment. The consequences can be dire: there has been confirmed cases of people losing limbs to treatable diseases* because their physician was adamant the cause was a spider bite, and these false diagnoses and self-diagnoses of lesions as "spider bites" are so common they can even obscure or delay detection of bacterial skin disease outbreaks.

Because their bite can cause skin necrosis, recluse/violin spiders (genus Loxosceles) often get falsely blamed for unexplained skin lesions, including in areas way off their range

On a broader scale, it also creates and promotes a culture of confusion where objective truth doesn't exist, and where facts matter less than the emotional impact of the way the story is told. A culture of confusion where the reader is exposed to so many different versions of the same story, and so many different degrees of fact distortion, that the only guide they're left with to determine what is true is too often what best fits what they want to believe.
There's no such thing as "harmless misinformation"; particularly when it comes from the sources people rely on to get informed.

Media-fuelled fear of spiders does cause significant harm to individuals and communities, and the best way to deal with this phenomenon would be to stop paying attention to needlessly alarmist articles. Their sensationalistic nature often relies on the intentionally misleading use of words such as "venomous", "poisonous" or "deadly", to make these animals sound more dangerous and frightening than they are.
It is, thus, critically important to know the real meaning of these terms, because some people use and abuse these common misconceptions to fool and scare their readers. Don't let that happen to you. Knowledge is power, because fear feeds on ignorance. Reclaim that power.⏹

Except when the source is explicitly cited, the images illustrating this blog are mine and are not free to use without permission.

References are integrated into the text of the article; the words in blue are clickable and will redirect you to the sources of the information. 

*Warning: These sources include detailed images of gruesome and extensive necrotic skin lesions, which some readers might find disturbing.