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The Death Cap Mushroom Is Spreading Across the US
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Discovery News reports that the death cap mushroom is now an invasive species on every continent except Antarctica. It is spreading along the East and West Coasts of the U.S. and appears to be moving south into Mexico. 'When someone eats Amanita phalloides, she typically won't experience symptoms for at least six and sometimes as many as 24 hours,' says Cat Adams. 'Eventually she'll suffer from abdominal cramps, vomiting, and severely dehydrating diarrhea. This delay means her symptoms might not be associated with mushrooms, and she may be diagnosed with a more benign illness like stomach flu. To make matters worse, if the patient is somewhat hydrated, her symptoms may lessen and she will enter the so-called honeymoon phase.' Without proper, prompt treatment, the victim can experience rapid organ failure, coma, and death. But good news is on the way. S. Todd Mitchell of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California has treated more than 60 patients with a drug derived from milk thistle. The patients who have started the drug on time (within 96 hours of ingesting the mushroom) and who have still had kidney function intact have all survived. 'When administered intravenously, the compound sits on and blocks the receptors that bring amatoxin into the liver, thus corralling the amatoxins into the blood stream so the kidneys can expel them faster,' says Adams. Still, Mitchell cautions against the 'regular look"'of deadly mushrooms. 'They smell very good and when they're cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten.'"
At least there is no chance in hell anyone would confuse them with Magic Mushrooms then ....
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
An English language website, hosted in the US, owned by a US company, administered and run by US employees is US focused? It's shocking, I tell you.
should have mentioned I mean they are easy to ID and eating unidentified fungi has always been stupid thing to do
Looks like the Killer Bees brought it with them from Mexico.
Is this hype because it is finding its way into the food supply in stores either via getting into commercial operations accidentally or being picked and sold as something else by wild collectors, or is it just journalistic pomp? Because, as somebody who regularly photographs fungi while out photographing native orchids, I'm willing to bet only a very small percentage of the population would ever even consider eating a wild mushroom. Even 90+ percent of my hiking buddies, all of them reasonably good at plant and fungus IDs, would never consider taking that risk unless it was something very expensive to just buy, like morels.
So, is there such a think as Xtreme eating (like extreme sports?)
If the people who ate them " described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten.'" have all survived once they took the antidote, would other people consider eating this mushroom KNOWING that they were putting their life at risk (assuming they had access to the antidote)?
I mean is this akin to eating the "Fugu" fish (which I have!) where, for some, part of the attraction of the food is the possibility that you might die?
Are there other foods which are (potentially?) dangerous or deadly but are so tasty that it is worth the risk?
Honestly, who is picking up random shrooms and eating them?
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To be fair, the story did note that, "the death cap mushroom is now an invasive species on every continent except Antarctica," and the last link was to an incident in Australia. So it could be coming soon to a table near you ... unless you are in Antarctica.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
"should have mentioned I mean they are easy to ID and eating unidentified fungi has always been stupid thing to do"
"Easy to ID" is a relative term. Even experts get some fungi wrong. For example, there are poisonous species of Galerina that sometimes grow right alongside the prized hallucinogenic "Liberty Cap" mushrooms, and even experts have to take a spore print and use a microscope to tell them apart.
As a PSA, here are two warning signs displayed by A Phalloides as in that picture on Wikipedia:
First is the "veil" surrounding the stem just below the cap, which you can see on the larger mushroom that is setting on its side. The other is the "cup" at the bottom.
It is important to note that neither of these are reliable indicators. Some edible species of mushrooms have one or both. Many poisonous species of mushrooms do not.
The point is: unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing, treat those features as strong warning signs. Best not to eat any mushrooms that have them.
I consider anyone who eats mushrooms to have suspect decision making processes.
So you're antifungal?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
only shes eat it?
No, they opted to use the pronoun that best describes your average, typical human on Earth.
Nope, 100% wrong.
English rules in all English-speaking countries default to the male pronoun when gender is general or unknown. Use of the female pronoun is ONLY in cases where you are only referring to females.
Any person using the female pronoun by default is simply trying to push some kind of agenda.
FTFA:
“When we present to FDA, it will be a slam dunk for approval,” he told Slate. “The drug has virtually no side effects, it’s very well tolerated, and if used correctly it’s awesomely effective.”
The doctor doing the research doesn't seem to share your concern.
Admitting that would mean GP couldn't engage in some anti-American douchebaggery, a very popular slashdot pasttime.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
An interesting evolutionary point, did the death cap evolve as toxic because it was so tasty, that only the toxic variety survived as the rest where eaten. In commercial terms would the death cap be an ideal mushroom to grow and selectively breed to eliminate the toxicity, being one of the tastiest varieties.
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Less than 30% of Slashdot's community is from the USA (27.3%). If you want all us "furriners" to leave, you'll be doing an even better job of depopulating Slashdot than Beta has.
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In other news, Rich NRI asked to pay Rs 50L to ex-wife who earns 65k per month.
"They smell very good and when they're cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten."
Clearly this is proof of Intelligent Design. If I were God I'd definitely place these things everywhere they'd fit just to keep my people on their toes. Nature's land mines.
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That reminds me of the old Borscht Belt joke about the guy who's filling out his social security application and they ask him if he's ever been married.
He says, "Yes, I was married to first wife for a wonderful 15 years, but tragically she died from eating poison mushrooms. Then, I remarried and my second wife, after eight glorious years died, believe it or not, also from eating poison mushrooms.
"Then, I married my third wife, and we were together for four years, when she died from a cerebral hemorrhage...
"Bitch wouldn't eat the mushrooms.".
You are welcome on my lawn.
As noted, to be safe you really want a definitive identification. In extreme cases this requires a spore print and microscope. On the other side, in many cases you narrow it down to either a good mushroom, or one that gives some people indigestion but that's it, and then you may just take the risk and taste it.
Foraging can be very enjoyable, and is not restricted to mushrooms, nor does it require living through a depression or the cultural revolution or any such crisis. However, it is very culture dependent, and many in north america there is a tendency to treat all unknown food as dangerous. A friend told me she was eating some wild berries in a local park with her son. A family came by, saw them eating and their boy said he wanted some too, to which the parents replied with a "No! these are poisonous."
Yes, men do not fall for the trap. Women see it and start thinking of all the ways they can cook it in the kitchen. Women are obsessed with kitchens and all things food, look at Eve.
Men had it made, perfection, immortality, perfect body, great lawn, we could fart and scratch our balls on silky smooth perfect grass in Eden. But Eve comes along her "kitchen obsession" kicks in and she starts bringing back foods to feed Adam, fattening him up, she breaks the rules and Adam has to suffer consequences along side the woman.
I wouldn't be surprised if many many cavemen died, they returned home with fresh Sabertooth tiger meat, but the woman had tried foraging picking plants "as they do" and feeds caveman poison ivy/oak/sumac and wipes out all Neanderthals!
She's.... Yup damn she's
God created misogyny.
har har :-)
Any person using the female pronoun by default is simply trying to push some kind of agenda.
I think this might be the person you are referring to and her blog where she links the agenda...
In case you are interested...
which is my point exactly, unless you KNOW for certain what it is you don't eat it. Like I say I spent my youth cataloging stuff like that including spore prints and so on and used to carry my guides while hiking and then my adulthood photographing them. Even after surefire ID and so on I'd never considered eating stuff that has very similar looking but highly poisonous ones I could mistake them for. Just isn't worth the chance. I have eaten fly agaric but that was prepping properly and flavour isn't great but I didn't eat them for that.
like you mention "reliable indicators" are not, not just because of similarities with other varieties but many indicators vary with age of the body (such a stem veil) and weathering and so on.
The Death Cap is something I learned as a child not to touch, and I teach my kids that too. It's pretty common where I live to learn which things in nature are edible and what to watch out for. I had the impression most people around the world had that kind of education "built in". Is that not the case in the US these days?
Why, yes! I AM new here.
The main reason these mushrooms are eaten is that they are misidentified as some similar looking edible species. The most frequent victims for these mushrooms are immigrants that mistake them for an edible species that they would find back where they were originally from. In the US on the west coast, that most often means immigrants from eastern Asia mistaking them for Volvariella, volavacea, commonly sold in supermarkets in cans as "Paddy Straw Mushrooms".
As far as being deadly, their lethality depends mostly on how much of them you eat. In a very general sense, if you eat some and don't seek medical treatment, your odds of dying are around 50%. With treatment (before the milk thistle extract), the survival rate was more like 90%.
There are lots of other mushrooms that also produce the same toxins in potentially deadly quantities. The ones that produce the most poisonings are Galerinas (especially G. marginata), since they resemble some of the hallucinogenic species of Psilocybe and can grow in the same habitats, at the same time, and even side by side with them. Lepiotas and Conocybes (Pholiotinas) can also be deadly in the same way, but don't generally resemble other mushrooms that most would want to eat.
There are lots of safe mushrooms and groups of mushrooms that are easy to identify accurately enough to eat without significant risk. Members of the genus Amanita (the ones these deadly ones belong to) don't fall into that category, unless you're a real expert. A lot of the "experts" that are referred to as such are people that can identify a few species (or maybe a few dozen species) in the woods - not somebody we should treat as a real expert. It's a bit like calling somebody who has done a "Hello World" program in a couple languages a programming expert.
If you want to learn enough to forage for your own wild mushrooms, you should contact a local mycological society. You can meet people who can show you how to identify some of the easier, safer mushrooms in your area.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
I've gotten that too.
Since we're talking rules of thumb here: in North America, all native berries with a blue or purple color are edible. (But not necessarily ornamental or garden plants; you don't know where they're from.)
Red berries: some are edible, some are not. Be familiar with those that are.
White berries: pretty much inedible. Many are poisonous, none are very nutritious. There are stories of people surviving for a time on snowberries, but... they're stories.
So? Females are the norm, and males the exception.
This is not so. By default each human cell is a male cell. Female cells have to be constantly refreshed into being female through hormone release.
The way it works is that when you are born male you have something called SRY and it increases SOX9 and decreases FOXL2 which is the "opposite" part of a cell that determines which gender it is. For females it is the otherway around. However, if a female does not suppress SOX9 they will develop male characteristics (this is why you can get an XX male). The cells default option is to move back toward "maleness" and this is why after menopause women and men aren't really that different (because at a cellular level they are tending towards the same gender expressions).
We've got the problem in California that there are lots of people who've come from places where mushroom hunting is a common occupation, and where there are local tasty mushrooms back in the old country which look a lot like our poisonous ones. And it's often not just one victim, it's a whole family who've been out in the woods for the day, picked the mushrooms, and cooked them for dinner. And now they all need liver transplants.
Bill Stewart
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It's not an English rule, it's a rule valid in most, if not all Indo-European languages that haven't gone through a full shift from the original tri-gendered PIE system to something without the M/F distinction. Languages like Russian, Slovak, and Czech still keep the original three genders (well, four, if you count the animate/inanimate opposition in masculine as two genders, as many linguists do), and since the M/F distinction is still present in them, M gender is used in indefinite and interrogative sentences. French shed the neutral gender, but since the M/F distinction is still present, M gender is used in indefinite and interrogative sentences, as in other Romance languages. English has all but lost morphological gender distinctions, but since gendered personal pronouns survive, M gender pronouns are used in those indefinite and interrogative sentences that would require the use of some gendered personal pronoun.
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