Necrosis of the tissues is then no longer a consequence of the poison, but of the reactions of the organism itself. The reason is that, as the bite of the brown spider is painless and the local reaction does not manifest itself immediately, people only look for help when the lesion in the skin has already set in.
Today’s serums neutralize the toxins in circulation in the human organism, but they are not very effective for treating the lesions on the skin. “The ideal treatment against the bite of a brown spider will be a very specific and polyvalent serum for neutralizing the action of the poison of several species, added to anti-inflammatories and to a protease inhibitor (an enzyme capable of breaking up proteins)”, Denise explains. Nowadays, the lesion is treated by means of the application of serum and specific medicines like the corticosteroids. The ointment from Butantan contains tetracycline, an antibiotic that acts as an inhibitor of the enzymes activated by the toxins of the spider, and reduced by 75% the development of necrosis of the skin, according to tests carried out on rabbits. The damage can be even greater: when falling into the bloodstream, a few micrograms of the substance are capable of destroying the red cells of the blood-, impairing the workings of the kidneys and leading to death. The other treatment is an ointment for the lesions caused by the poison of these spiders at the place of the bite and that can take as long as eight months to heal – depending on the extent of necrosis, a skin implant may be necessary. Produced on the basis of sphingomyelinase, the protein that really causes the damage to the human body, discovered in 1998 by the team from Butantan, the new anti-loxoscelic serum may become an alternative to the one currently used, an antiarachnid serum, prepared only with the poison extracted from one of them, Loxosceles gaucho, and also employed against the bites of scorpions and armed spiders. One of them is a new serum, now at the stage of testing in vitro and on animals, specifically against the species of brown spider found in Brazil.
With her team from the Immunochemical Laboratory of the Butantan Institute, she has deciphered the main components of the poison, she has discovered how they act, and developed two new treatments capable of neutralizing the action of the toxins on the human body. Even though they are not aggressive and only attack when touched, they caused about 8 thousand cases of poisoning a year in 20 in Brazil, with two deaths, one in the state of Santa Catarina and the other in the state of Goiás.īut Denise has advanced a lot in her research into these spiders in this time. Even today, she has not become used to these little animals with long, thin legs, sometimes so small to the point of almost not being seen. It was because she had found one of them hidden in the trunk at the foot of her bed, during a collection expedition made on a farm in the municipality of Telêmaco Borba, in the state of Paraná. Ten years ago, when she was beginning to study brown spiders, the most poisonous species in Brazil, biologist Denise Tambourgi spent three sleepless nights, frightened to death of getting a bite.