A Review of Black Widow (Araneae: Theridiidae) Envenomation, Epidemiology, and Antivenom Utilization in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two species of black widow spider (BWS-Latrodectus hesperus Chamberlin & Ivie and Latrodectus variolus Walckenaer) naturally occur in Canada and are capable of causing deleterious envenomation to humans. No Canadian literature exists on the frequency of envenomations by these species or the use of antivenom in the treatment of those patients. A review of primary Canadian arachnology data was undertaken to identify BWS populations. A retrospective review of the Health Canada Special Access Program records generated epidemiology and the utilization of antivenom for BWS envenomations in Canada. The geographical distribution of BWS species is limited to along the southern Canadian border. From January 2009 to December 2015, there were five BWS envenomations that required treatment with antivenom and all cases occurred in British Columbia. An average patient age of 41 yr ± 21 SD (range 7-59) was observed, along with three of the five patients being female. The average number of vials used for treatment was 2 ± 1 SD (range 1-3). BWS Antivenin was also obtained by facilities in Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, but not used in any of these jurisdictions. Further investigation is necessary to determine the annual incidence of BWS envenomations and if treatment with BWS antivenin is required.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".