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A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

cleveland.com

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Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#131

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

DangitBobby wrote: post #52
smegsicle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a mushroom identification app that doesn't draw attention to toxic lookalikes sounds pretty close to criminally negligent

And this is why we can't have nice things. This opinion is wild to me. You do not trust a consumer app with life and death decisions, especially over something where the potential upside is getting to eat a mushroom you found and the potential downside is death. Making more criminals is not the answer.

And yet clearly the existence of these apps has made the problem worse. People don't read disclaimers. And people do idiotic things. Now, for a mushroom identification app clearly the only functionality that actually matters is telling edible mushrooms from toxic ones.

How is it okay to make fundamentally broken software and then release/sell it as if it's functional? It shouldn't be, just like it isn't for architects, engineers(real ones) to design and build buildings that fall down and cars that explode.

Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#132

Post by whatshisface »

1letterunixname wrote: post #120
mattigames wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the ridiculous prices of health care in America it's likely also cheaper too.

A bicycle accident bill can be over 100k USD without any surgery or being admitted overnight. Having a stroke can be 500-600k which might cause another upon seeing the bill.

People do not pay $500k bills for strokes, that's not possible.

Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#133

Post by MikePlacid »

1letterunixname wrote: post #120
mattigames wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the ridiculous prices of health care in America it's likely also cheaper too.

A bicycle accident bill can be over 100k USD without any surgery or being admitted overnight. Having a stroke can be 500-600k which might cause another upon seeing the bill.

A bicycle accident without any surgery or being admitted overnight cost me about $600. A broken piece of the elbow (rather painful if you move your hand): one emergency room visit $300, an extra bill for some extra X-ray on that visit $180 (I declined to pay it, but my wife paid by mistake), a couple visits for observation $50 each, amounts approximate. A hospital was a bit pushing me to get a couple more extra X-rays ($80 each), but I declined those.

So I am a bit wondering what you should have broken for 100k USD without requiring surgery or overnight stay.

Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#134

Post by uwagar »

colechristensen wrote: post #65
chernofool wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most plant ID apps have a disclaimer saying that you should never eat anything that you use the app to identify. Seek reminds you every time you open the camera. They're mostly intended as entertainment, but some of them use the data to analyze where species are growing in realtime.

Honestly though there should be limits to the amount that a disclaimer should be able to protect you when your product advises people to do dangerous things you know (or have every responsibility to know) could be lethal. There’s a lot of room between a one in a billion mistake that hurts somebody and a fifty fifty chance a mushroom is poisonous. There are plenty of edible vs deadly mushrooms that only have incredibl…

>Effectively what I’m saying is a disclaimer shouldn’t be able to get you out of murder charges for a game of Russian roulette.

By your logic knife makers will all be praying that their knives arent used for killing or harming people or they'd be charged for murder.

Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#135

Post by derefr »

Aloha wrote: post #130
nkurz wrote: post #44

Since no one has done it yet, I'll ask the obvious question about the FDA: how many people die or need a liver transplant each year because the FDA is being unreasonable here? Here's some quotes from the article: Approximately 40% of people who ingest the deadly Amanita mushrooms die or require a liver transplant, according to Dr. Pierre Gholam, the liver specialist at University Hospitals who treated Hickman. ... Th…

"Gholam says that the process of FDA approval for Silibinin is slow, primarily because it only works for amatoxin poisoning, from the Amanita mushroom species. Those poisonings are rare – so gathering enough data to satisfy the safety and efficacy requirements of the FDA takes time. And there is little financial incentive by the company that owns the drug to invest in its research and development." Incidentally, thes…

My question is: why does the FDA need to (get domestic pharma companies to) conduct its own studies here? If the drug has been used in Europe for 30 years, presumably there are 30 years of evidence in European clinical practice that can be used as evidence. Maybe even existing meta-analyses of said evidence in European medical journals. Why isn't that sufficient?

Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#136

Post by LambdaComplex »

whatshisface wrote: post #132
1letterunixname wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bicycle accident bill can be over 100k USD without any surgery or being admitted overnight. Having a stroke can be 500-600k which might cause another upon seeing the bill.

People do not pay $500k bills for strokes, that's not possible.

"Do people pay $500k hospital bills?" and "Do people receive $500k hospital bills?" are two different questions.

Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#137

Post by Gibbon1 »

duskwuff wrote: post #123
dmitrybrant wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cultural knowledge passed down through generations. Mushroom foraging is super popular in Russia and other Slavic countries, and my grandmother taught me most of the fundamentals before we immigrated to the US, and I continued to study field guide books on my own. When you get to know the specific bits of anatomy of the mushroom body, the trees with which they're symbiotic, the seasons in which they occur, etc.,…

Incidentally, I've heard that a significant number of people get poisoned by mushrooms when they learned to recognize edible mushrooms in another country (often China or Eastern Europe), then move to the US and try to forage for mushrooms here. Knowing one region's edible/poisonous mushrooms doesn't make you an expert on anything outside that region.

There was a spate of mushroom poisonings among south east asian immigrants in the 1980's in California for that exact reason.

Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#138

Post by allisdust »

I never understood why people don't just eat store bought mushrooms. Why risk liver failure and other serious health complications not to mention countless hours of hospital time over something as trivial as eating wild mushrooms. Why not teach in school explicitly to not eat wild mushrooms and may be teach how to farm safe varieties if someone desperately needs to eat their own picked ones.

Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#139

Post by rex_lupi »

nkurz wrote: post #44

Since no one has done it yet, I'll ask the obvious question about the FDA: how many people die or need a liver transplant each year because the FDA is being unreasonable here? Here's some quotes from the article: Approximately 40% of people who ingest the deadly Amanita mushrooms die or require a liver transplant, according to Dr. Pierre Gholam, the liver specialist at University Hospitals who treated Hickman. ... Th…

> despite its several beneficial effects on the liver, silibinin and all the other compounds found in silymarin, especially silychristin seem to act as potent disruptors of the thyroid system by blocking the MCT8 transporter. The long term intake of silymarin can lead to some form of thyroid disease and if taken during pregnancy, silymarin can cause the development of the Allan–Herndon–Dudley syndrome. Although this information is not being taken into consideration by all regulatory bodies, several studies now consider silymarin and especially silychristin to be important inhibitors of the MCT8 transporter and a potential disruptor of the thyroid hormone functions. (From Wikipedia)

I guess emergency use would still be okay?

Re: A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

#140

Post by MikePlacid »

WalterBright wrote: post #93
dmitrybrant wrote: post #69

I've been foraging mushrooms for 30+ years, and I triple-check every single specimen before cooking it. The idea of a novice forager using an app to identify mushrooms is... unconscionable! Like... breathtakingly stupid. I've commented on this before, but it continues to baffle me how poorly-educated our public is about wild plants, berries, and mushrooms. And stories like this just perpetuate the fear (and stigma?)…

If I was an expert, I still wouldn't eat them after triple-checking them. I don't think they taste so good that they're worth any risk. It's not like they're chocolate.

Actually gathering mushrooms is not about the taste. It’s about the process. Like hunt, but without killing any animal, or like fishing but without killing any fish. There is a nice book about this aspect of mushroom gathering, The Third Hunt by Vladimir Soloukhin:

https://www.nhbs.com/the-third-hunt-book

I agree with the thread-starter that some actions look incredibly stupid, like an attempt to eat something similar to Amanita (indeed, no taste is worth the risk) or the belief that there any no deadly mushrooms in any given place on the planet. Exclusion first - as kids we were allowed to touch Boletuses only, and then some distinct non-boletuses that have no poisonous lookalikes.

But the described actions are not actually stupidity if you think about it. It’s an attempt to do something that can be done safely only if you are immersed in a culture that preserve and cherish knowledge on this subject and promotes safe indulgement in related pleasures.

We can respect all cultures, probably. But to gather and eat mushrooms safely you should follow (not necessarily) a culture you have grown up in but culture of people or groups who know how to do it safely.

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