One of those surviving mutants had a broken STT3B gene, which the researchers hypothesized might help transport the toxin into human cells. Then they fed them the AMA toxin to see which ones survived. The research team took human cells and edited them to break individual genes. "I had no idea this was happening," Pringle says. For Pringle and Brewer, who were not involved with the antidote discovery, the results came as a surprise. The discovery of a potential antidote for death cap poisoning came seemingly out of nowhere. "They didn't know exactly how that worked, but they thought maybe it stimulated the liver." There is also a newer drug derived from the milk thistle plant called silibinin, but Brewer says that, "it's still undergoing FDA trials."Īnd if those treatments didn't work, "quite often they would have to prepare for a liver transplant," Brewer says. Doctors sometimes give patients, "a large dose of penicillin G," Brewer says. Initially, their symptoms typically include "horrible gastrointestinal problems, vomiting and diarrhea, and people are usually extremely dehydrated," Brewer says.įew effective treatments exist for death cap poisonings. It can take hours before someone who mistakenly eats a mushroom containing AMA to feel sick. It essentially stops the cells in those organs from making proteins, causing the cellular processes to grind to a halt. The lethal amanitas all produce a toxin called ɑ-amanitin, also known as AMA, which attacks the liver and kidneys. Along with destroying angels and a few other species, they form the group known as lethal amanitas, which are responsible for 90% of fatalities by mushroom poisoning around the world. The death cap mushroom, Amanita phalloides, is perhaps the most infamous of the deadly mushrooms. And then if you make that mistake, then you can end up eating a death cap." We tend to underestimate how diverse mushrooms are, Pringle says, thinking that "the thing that's in Massachusetts is the thing that's in Ukraine. "There was a Ukrainian family and they thought, 'Oh, looks like this thing we have back in Ukraine,'" she says. Those most susceptible to mushroom poisoning are often immigrants, says Anne Pringle, a mycologist and expert on death cap mushrooms at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. and Canada but in other areas as well, including the Northeast) and can easily fool foragers from countries where death caps don't exist but the lookalikes do. Death caps grow widely in Europe and parts of North America (mostly in the western U.S. "There's a really small percent that are tasty gourmet edibles, and then a really small percent that are poisonous."īut to the untrained eye, the unassuming white cap and stalk of the death cap can be confused with tasty edible mushrooms such as the paddy straw. In reality, "the vast majority are completely innocuous," says Marin Brewer, a mycologist at the University of Georgia. While foragers should take heed of regular warnings by health officials about the dangers of poisonous mushrooms, most mushrooms are not dangerous. Mushroom poisoning is often a case of mistaken identity So far, the drug has only been shown to be effective in mice, but it's a discovery that could help prevent deaths from poisoning by death caps and by many other poisonous mushroom species found around the world. Until now, effective treatments for death cap poisonings were few and far between with no proven antidote available.īut in new research published this week in Nature Communications, a team of Chinese and Australian scientists reports that they may have found an antidote for death cap mushroom poisoning – and it's a widely available drug that already has FDA approval. Mushroom poisonings are tough to track reliably, but some scientists estimate that they cause about 10,000 illnesses and 100 deaths a year globally. Eating only half a cap can shut down your liver – and if you don't get medical attention fast enough, that shroom just might turn out to be your last meal. It's one of the most poisonous mushrooms in the world. They don't call it the "death cap" mushroom without good reason. Death cap (Amanita phalloides), Amanitaceae.ĭe Agostini Picture Library via Getty Images
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |