WINNIPEG – A doctor believes a gaping hole in a Canadian woman's leg may have been caused by a rare poisonous spider, the Winnipeg Free Press is reporting.
Dr. Neil Simonsen, an infectious disease and wound care specialist, believes a middle aged woman from Manitoba, located in Canada's southern prairie region, was bitten by a hobo spider while walking through a Winnipeg field at the end of June, the report said.
Bites from the hobo spider, which resides in parts of Western Canada and is not native to Manitoba, instantly eat away human flesh and tissue, Simonsen told the Winnipeg Press.
He said the woman was left with a crater of black, dead tissue on her leg.
Simonsen removed all the dead tissue from the woman's leg and applied sterile dressings to help the wound heal and prevent infection, the newspaper reported.
Terry Galloway, a University of Manitoba entomologist, said definitively pinpointing the woman's wound to a hobo spider is difficult to do without catching the spider itself.
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