Poison nightmare of wife bitten by a black widow's cousin

A housewife clearing leaves from outside her back door suffered five days of agony after she was bitten on the thumb by a relative of the black widow spider.

Geraldine Williamson, 46, suffered breathing difficulties and lumps developed on her arms.

"It has been hell," said the mother of three yesterday at her home in Exeter.

"To be the victim of such a venomous attack on my own doorstep is horrific."

After contacting the Natural History Museum, Mrs Williamson identified the culprit as Steatoda nobilis, the false widow spider.

She is only the ninth recorded British victim. None has proved fatal.

The false widow's ancestors are thought to have arrived with bananas from the Canary Islands, and thanks to the increasingly warmer winters they have spread across southern England.

"I suddenly felt a sharp needlelike pain in my thumb," she said yesterday.

"Within seconds it had turned black and blue and swelled up.

"I couldn't breathe properly so my husband Clive took me straight to A&E. My veins were standing out and were a different shade of blue.

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"All the doctors and nurses crowded round because they had never seen anything like it. The hospital put my arm in traction and kept me in for a few hours as the poison had got into my system.

"Since then I have suffered flu-like symptoms, alternately hot and cold, and had sweeping pains through my head, arm and thumb.

"There must be a colony of false widows here and I want to warn everyone in the area to be on the lookout so they don't have to go through such a horrible and frightening experience as I did."

The false widow, first sighted in Torquay in 1879, is a very small, long-legged reddish spider which lives on walls, fences and tree bark.

It does not normally bite unless it is provoked.

It has spread from Devon and Dorset along the south coast into Sussex and north into Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and as far as the outskirts of London.

Stuart Hine, of the Natural History Museum, said: "It used to be that only a handful would be able to survive the cold weather so the numbers were always kept down.

"But now they are all surviving the winter and the numbers have just rocketed into the hundreds of thousands. They can hide in gardening gloves and will bite when you put your hand in.

"We have eight confirmed records of people having been bitten. My advice is, if you see one, leave it alone."