The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows for a certain number of bugs in your produce. According to the FDA most of these creepy crawlers don’t pose a health hazard to humans when they come in contact. The FDA even has a list of bugs commonly found in your fruits and vegetables. You can expect to find 30 alphids in 100 grams of Brussels, spinach can have spotted caterpillar larvae or larval fragments, and corn earn worms can be found hiding in the husk. The FDA allows for these insects to be present as its considered unavoidable and as long as they do not compromise the aesthetic quality of the food.She had her seven-month-old son Leo with her in the bedroom.
“I had brought a banana up to my bedroom and opened it and I think I must have broken an egg sack because hundreds of these tiny spiders went everywhere,” she told the BBC.
Price called 999, the UK’s 911 version, and was told to evacuate her home immediately.
“My mother lived just across the road, so luckily I had somewhere to go that time of night,” she says with relief.
She called the super market where she bought the fruit, Asda.
The single mother was asked to bring the fruit back along with the spiders.
Management at the store may not have been fully aware of the danger these spiders posed to Price and her baby.
The Brazilian wondering spider belongs to the genus Phoneutria family. The word translated from Greek means, “murderess”
This spider can be found in South and Central America.
Jo-Anne Nina Sewlal, an arachnologist at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago says they “are called wandering spiders because they do not build webs but wander on the forest floor at night, actively hunting prey.”
They wait until night to do their hunting which can include feeding off other spiders and insects.
Sewlal says the spider gives off a warning prior to attacking by raising their first two pairs of legs.
The female wandering spider can lay up to 1,000 eggs at a time.
They can vary from goose bumps, severe burning pain, and sweating.
This can be followed with nausea, cramping in the abdomen, blurred vision, fast or slow heart rate, convulsions, hypothermia, and shock.
“So if it did inject all of its venom, it (would) have to wait until its body manufactured more before it could hunt,” she clarifies.
The 30-year-old said she tried speaking to the store’s head office but their suggestion was just as bad as the store manager’s.
“I said I didn’t have any for Leo. That’s when he offered me a £50 voucher, as a goodwill gesture, to go to the store to get baby milk and pyjamas and things he needed,” Price says.
She was referred to pest control. Unfortunately, they were not equipped to handle foreign spiders.
“Pest control sprayed the whole house with chemicals, they did it twice to make sure they had killed everything,” she adds. “I had to have someone to look after my dog for three days as he could not be in the house.”
Price was able to finally move back to her house on Friday, April 28. “When I am putting my clothes on I am still looking for them,” she admits. “It has put me off bananas. I haven’t had any since last week.
“Incidents like these are extremely rare, but we understand how upsetting it must have been for Ms Price and we are in contact with her to find a resolution,” the statement continues. “We’d like to reassure all our customers that the chance of finding a spider is incredibly low and it’s even less likely that a tropical spider could survive outside of their warm climate.”
“I’m a chef and have had an encounter with a tropical spider before. I got bitten by a false widow spider several years ago and ended up in hospital,” she says.
“The way Asda has treated me, it’s absolutely disgusting. They said I should be taking it up with the supplier but I don’t pay the supplier I pay Asda,” Price argues.
