What’s Austrian For ‘Arachnophobia’?

Vienna, famous for it's music, and a canned sausage as well, is rapidly becoming famous for a brand new thing entirely! A visit by a large number of Cheiracanthium Punctorium, also known as Dornfingerspinne in German. In English it would be known as the yellow sac spider. The little yellow and brown striped arachnid has moved into town, seemingly intent on running off the human population. Or it could be a media-driven frenzy. Much ado about not much.

VIENNA, Austria - An eight-legged invasion is giving some Austrians the creeps. The venomous yellow sack spider, whose painful bite can cause headache and nausea, has become the talk of the town since several people were bitten earlier this summer.

Reports of spider sightings have dominated local media, triggering hundreds of calls to a Vienna poison hotline and prompting the government to issue a plea for calm.

"The bites of a yellow sack spider are indeed painful but not deadly," Health Minister Maria Rauch-Kallat said in a statement. "If you are bitten, please don't panic and in case of discomfort immediately contact a doctor."

Underscoring the hysteria, 190 people who feared they might have been bitten went Wednesday to the main hospital in the northwestern city of Linz. Only eight of them turned out to have possible symptoms, doctors told Austrian state broadcaster ORF.

Eva Reiner, a Vienna business consultant, fished a dead yellow sack spider out of her pool this week — and has not gone swimming since.

"It wasn't even alive, and it still looked evil to me," she said.

But experts are urging people to keep things in perspective.

The yellow and brown striped critter, whose Latin name is Cheiracanthium Punctorium and is known in German as a "Dornfingerspinne," is one of 1,000 similar species found in Austria and neighboring countries including Germany, Italy and Switzerland, said Christian Komposch of an animal ecology institute in the southern city of Graz.

There are sightings every year, said Komposch, who blames the media for spreading misleading information and fanning the frenzy.

We don't want to be fanning the frenzy. We'll just put in a calm, measured assurance for the folks in Vienna: You are all going to be eaten by these ferocious arachnid conquerors. They will show you no mercy at all. First the pools, then the saunas, next your very beds!

Always glad to be of assistance. Blue Crab Boulevard, long known for it's calm rational approach to the animal uprising!

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1. Blue Crab Boulevard » Blog Archive » Global Arachnophobia! — Friday, 17 November , 2006 @ 8:48 am