Three boys in Chayanta, Bolivia suffered black widow bites following an attempt to gain superpowers so they would be like Spider-Man.
The boys, aged eight, 10, and 12, found the black widow while their mother was cutting up wood, according to Daily Mirror. Just as Peter Parker gains superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider, the boys hoped that if the black widow bit them, they would get powers too. In order to coax the arachnid into biting them, "the boys are said to have provoked the spider with a stick." The venomous bites quickly took effect, and the boys experienced "severe muscle pain, abdominal cramps, increased heart rate and muscle spasms."
The boys' mother quickly took them to a local health center and they were given medicine before being transferred to a hospital in Llallagua, where the conditions only intensified. After yet another transfer to the Children's Hospital in La Paz, the country's capital, "the brothers were given a serum for their bites and their condition improved." They were released from the hospital five days later.
Virgilio Pietro, head of epidemiology of the Health Ministry, spoke about the case during a coronavirus conference in order to warn parents how children could be affected by the things they see. "For children everything is real," he said. "Films are real, dreams could be real, and they (children) are the hope of our life."
Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Spider-Man made his Marvel comics debut in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962. Since then, he's become arguably Marvel's most popular character, spawning a number of different incarnations and often featuring in multiple ongoing titles at once.