Boys Will Be Boys,

this is like the time as a kid in the 1950s I believed if I ate enough spinach, I would become strong, like Popeye!

photograph CanyonlandsNPS/Flickr, alas it did not work and I grew up hating spinach for life!, but for another unnamed young lad from the municipality of Vichuloma, near the city of Oruro, in Central Bolivia, his bid to become his hero did not turn out so well, in fact it nearly killed him! The 8 year old wanted to be like his hero, Spiderman, he put a highly-poisonous spider, a black widow spider, (Latrodectus), on the back of his hand and let it bite him, as in the movie, after three hours of agony, he told his mother that he had been bitten by a colourful spider, the child was eventually referred to the Hospital General San Juan de Dios in the city of Oruro as a medical emergency. After hearing about the spider bite, pediatricians there contacted Ernesto Vásquez, head of the Zoonotic Diseases Program of the Departmental Health Service of Oruro, who helped establish what kind of a spider had bitten the boy,

“The child, without considering the risks, picked it up and placed it on the back of his palm where the arachnid made the bite,” Vásquez told the EFE news agency. “We are extremely concerned because the analysis and questions asked to the child when he had already recovered indicate that he picked up the arachnid with a simple purpose—that he wanted to become Spider-Man.” the boy’s mother confirmed that he was a big Spider-Man fan, but she had no idea he could do something so dangerous to actually become like the Marvel superhero. Luckily, after identifying the spider species, doctors administered the proper anti-venom and the boy’s condition became stable only 30 minutes later, “These black spiders with red backs are black widows. They do not cause anyone to become Spider-Man—on the contrary, they put lives at risk,” Vásquez said, for the story the video above and here, I guess the Health & Safety brigade will demand a warning on all future showings of Spiderman movies!