Woman bitten by recluse spider, ear rots, doctors recreate it with rib cartilage

From Holland:

One woman's Italian vacation took a turn for the worse when she woke up with pain in her ear one night. She had no way of knowing then that she'd just been bitten by a Mediterranean recluse spider, and that a chunk of her ear would soon be liquefied by the spider's venom. But that's exactly what happened, according to a recent report of her case.
The 22-year-old woman soon sought treatment for her pain in an Italian hospital, where doctors prescribed an antihistamine. But the swelling in her face and pain in her ear didn't get any better. Once she was back home in the Netherlands, the ear got worse, and portions of it turned black — a clear sign that the skin and cartilage cells were dead.
The dead tissue made it clear to doctors that the woman had been bitten by a Mediterranean recluse, a spider whose bite is known to destroy skin and underlying fat, causing "sunken-in" scars or "a disfigured ear, if you are very unlucky," said Dr. Marieke van Wijk, a plastic surgeon in the Netherlands involved in the woman's treatment. In this case, van Wijk and her colleagues removed the dead tissue, and recreated it using cartilage from the woman's ribs.
Recluse spiders rarely bite people, and when they do, the bites don't usually inflict serious damage or large scars. Most bites occur when people roll over onto a spider while asleep, or when they put their foot into a shoe in which a recluse is found. It's difficult to diagnose a brown-recluse-spider bite, and many suspected bites actually come from stinging insects, or are caused by other things, such as bacterial infections.