Is a town in India being overrun with poisonous spiders?
This story is starting to look like just a case of panic.
Sometimes those "news of the weird" stories that sound too weird to be true really ARE too weird to be true. It's a case of dueling journalists at this point: I have seen armies of articles that make a plausible case both for and against the report that a small town in rural India is being flooded with killer poisonous spiders.
This CNN article is one of the most skeptical. It makes the point that one of the people who was bitten was probably actually bitten by a poisonous snake. It also adds that the man was not taken to a Western hospital for treatment, but instead was brought to a local healer or shaman for assistance. (There are a lot of illnesses where faith healing can be useful - the placebo effect is surprisingly strong. But I don't think "snake bite" is one of them.)
The article also cites a reporter who believes the second person wasn't bitten by anything.
