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 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
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 [CHN] Mushroom may be to blame for sudden deaths in Dali
#12890791 - 07/12/10 11:54 PM (1 year, 10 months ago) |
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Mushroom may be to blame for sudden deaths in Dali
July 13, 2010 - gokunming.com
 An invisible killer has been striking villages around Dali every rainy season since the late 1970s. But now there is hope that the root cause of "Yunnan unknown cause sudden death syndrome", which has killed at least 400 people in the last 30 years, has been discovered.
According to a report in the July 9 issue of Science magazine [subscription required] the culprit is believed to be a lethal combination of high barium levels in villagers' bodies and a newly discovered variety of toxic mushroom.
The syndrome has been killing people seemingly randomly during the rainy months of June, July and August – often with multiple cases occurring one after another in the same village.
"We heard amazing stories about how people would drop dead in the middle of a conversation," said Zhang Shu, a cardiologist and top expert on sudden deaths who was part of a multiyear investigation into the syndrome that included a team of epidemiologists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing.
After years of false belief that the syndrome was caused by a rare heart condition called Keshan disease, scientists from Beijing and Dali began to look into other possibilities.
Most of the deaths occurred in areas where villagers make money from gathering and selling wild mushrooms during the rainy season. Because villagers depend so heavily on income from mushrooms, they only eat the mushrooms that have no commercial value.
Scientists eventually began to see a pattern: a small mushroom known locally as simply "little white mushroom" or "butterfly mushroom" that was commercially worthless and eaten only by villagers. The mushroom had never before been identified, but once investigators were aware of it they began to discover that many of the victims had eaten the mushroom not long before dying.
The current hypothesis is that a newly discovered toxic compound in the mushrooms is stopping hearts that are already stressed from high blood concentrations of barium, possibly coming from the local water supply. The white mushrooms contain high concentrations of barium, which causes abnormal heartbeats in humans.
Scientists have not conclusively proven that the barium and mushroom combination is to blame for the deaths, but in areas where villagers were warned not to eat the mushroom last rainy season deaths fell markedly.
Researchers are hoping that if any more sudden deaths occur in the area that they will be able to detect the mushroom's amino acids and barium in the blood of the deceased, which would be strong evidence in support of the barium/mushroom hypothesis.
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 Alan Rockefeller
Mycologist
Registered: 03/10/07
Posts: 24,722
Last seen: 4 days, 19 hours
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Re: [CHN] Mushroom may be to blame for sudden deaths in Dali [Re: veggie]
#12891263 - 07/13/10 03:28 AM (1 year, 10 months ago) |
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Which mushroom is this?
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bbl337
genetic material is Ar based
Registered: 02/12/09
Posts: 7,000
Last seen: 6 days, 26 minutes
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Re: [CHN] Mushroom may be to blame for sudden deaths in Dali [Re: Alan Rockefeller]
#12891750 - 07/13/10 07:56 AM (1 year, 10 months ago) |
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it's purdy whatever it is
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treal
Skillet
Registered: 10/26/09
Posts: 34
Last seen: 1 year, 1 month
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Re: [CHN] Mushroom may be to blame for sudden deaths in Dali [Re: bbl337]
#12892042 - 07/13/10 09:34 AM (1 year, 10 months ago) |
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So the shroom is accumulating barium from the environment which is stopping people's hearts, or a combo of the shroom w/ barium? I guess they're not sure yet. I have a feeling we will hear a lot more stories like this out of china. A ancient culture of fungi consumption combined with a modern culture of toxification. I'm assuming that people/industry is responsible for the barium...but I could be wrong.
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veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 13,985
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Re: [CHN] Mushroom may be to blame for sudden deaths in Dali [Re: Alan Rockefeller]
#12892081 - 07/13/10 09:43 AM (1 year, 10 months ago) |
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Evidence points to the genus Trogia, according to an updated Associated Press story ...
Tiny, Toxic Mushrooms Kill Hundreds In China
July 13, 2010 - NPR
 BEIJING - Every summer during the height of the rainy season, villagers of all ages in a corner of southwestern China would suddenly die of cardiac arrest.
No one knew what caused Yunnan Sudden Death Syndrome, blamed for an estimated 400 deaths in the past three decades.
Now, after a five-year investigation, an elite investigative unit from China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention believes it has pinpointed the cause: an innocuous-looking small mushroom known as Little White.
The search for the culprit began in 2005 and took investigators to remote villages spread over the rural highlands of Yunnan province, said Robert Fontaine, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There was "this very obvious clustering of deaths in villages in very short periods of time in the summer," said Fontaine, who helped in the investigation. "It appears that there was something a little different going on."
Local health officials had noted the deaths for years. In 2004, they appealed to Beijing for assistance. The government gave the task to the China Field Epidemiology Training Program, a unit of medical investigators at China's CDC assigned some of the country's toughest health mysteries.
The medical teams encountered obstacles. Many villagers didn't speak standard Chinese, instead communicating in their own dialect. Villages were scattered in often remote areas. Rapid burials made it difficult to conduct autopsies. Torrential rain and mudslides hampered travel.
But that first year, investigators were able to narrow down the list of possibilities: most victims had drunk surface water, they had emotional stress and they ate mushrooms.
The investigators zeroed in on mushrooms, because the deaths were closely aligned with the harvesting season. More than 90 percent of the deaths occurred in July or August. By the end of 2005, investigators began issuing warnings to some villages to avoid eating unfamiliar mushrooms.
That was a difficult order to follow. Yunnan province is legendary for its wide variety of wild mushrooms, many of which are exported at high prices. Entire families go out to hunt for them during the summer months.
By 2008, investigators had discovered a relatively unknown mushroom in a number of homes where people had died. The mushroom is not usually sold in the markets, because it's too small.
"We repeatedly found it at all these sites," Fontaine said.
A public information campaign to warn against eating the mushrooms has dramatically reduced the number of deaths. Only a handful have been reported in the last couple of years, and none so far this year.
However, the mystery has not yet been definitively solved.
Testing found the mushroom contained some toxins, though not enough to be deadly. Chinese scientists need to isolate the toxin and test whether it triggers cardiac arrests.
Researchers have hypothesized that there is a second agent. Many of the victims showed high levels of barium, a heavy metal in the soil that seeps into mushrooms.
"There is a lot of work left to do," Fontaine said. "We really need additional lab investigations."
Problems with poisonous mushrooms are common throughout Asia, said Diderik De Vleeschauwer, a spokesman for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization regional office in Thailand.
"Normally we expect people to have knowledge of what they can and can't eat. One would think there is indigenous knowledge available about what they can forage," he said. "But these are accidents that can happen."
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Mycomyth
Demented Avenger
Registered: 03/19/06
Posts: 327
Loc: At the crux of the matter...
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Re: [CHN] Mushroom may be to blame for sudden deaths in Dali [Re: treal]
#12893289 - 07/13/10 01:56 PM (1 year, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
treal said:
So the shroom is accumulating barium from the environment which is stopping people's hearts, or a combo of the shroom w/ barium?
Read a little closer...the villagers already have an abnormaly high amount of Barium in their bodies. (Funny....that's one of the main components of the chemtrails. hmmmm) That, in combination with the mushroom, is apparently deadly.
"...the culprit is believed to be a lethal combination of --high barium levels in villagers' bodies-- and --a newly discovered variety of toxic mushroom.--"
M
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Wave after wave of demented avengers marched cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.
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veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 13,985
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Re: [CHN] Mushroom may be to blame for sudden deaths in Dali [Re: veggie]
#15756774 - 02/03/12 03:48 PM (3 months, 23 days ago) |
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Update ...
Behind a Mushroom Scourge
February 3, 2012 - cen.acs.org
For the past 30 years apparently healthy villagers in southwestern China’s Yunnan province have been mysteriously dying. More than 260 people have been claimed by what has come to be known as Yunnan Sudden Unexpected Death.
Recent epidemiological studies have implicated a previously undescribed mushroom, named Trogia venenata Zhu L. Wang for its discoverer, in the deaths. Seeking further evidence that this mushroom is in fact responsible, a team of scientists in China have identified three toxic amino acids that they believe give T. venenata its poisonous properties (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., DOI: 10.1002/anie.201106502).
Extracts of T.venenata contain γ-guanidinobutyric acid, a compound known to cause seizures, as well as two previously unidentified amino acids that are derivatives of hexynoic acid, reports a team led by Ji-Kai Liu, of the Kunming Institute of Botany, and Guang Zeng, of the Chinese Center for Disease Control & Prevention.
The researchers synthesized the newly discovered amino acids and found the compounds to be lethal in studies with mice. They also used liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to examine blood taken from a victim of Yunnan Sudden Unexpected Death. They found that the blood and one of the newly discovered amino acids shared similar fragment ions.
“We are 90% certain we have solved the mystery, that this mushroom is the cause of the deaths,” Liu tells C&EN. “And we are almost 100% certain that these three toxins are the cause of the mushrooms being fatal.”
But not everyone is as certain. “The contents of those toxins in the mushroom are amazingly high,” comments Hirokazu Kawagishi, an expert on toxic mushrooms at Japan’s Shizuoka University. Therefore, he says, it is possible that these compounds are the cause of the deaths. However, Kawagishi admits to some skepticism because, based on Liu and Zeng’s results, a person would still have to eat about 4 kg of the fresh mushroom to consume the lethal amounts of the new amino acids.
“That is a staggering amount,” agrees Michael Beug, a retired environmental chemistry professor and mycologist at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Wash. “The fact that there have been no deaths since 2009 when the villagers were warned not to eat these mushroom is pretty strong evidence that the mushrooms are involved in the deaths,” he says, but “the toxin or combination of toxins is yet to be adequately explained.”
Liu tells C&EN that he believes a synergistic combination of the new amino acids with γ-guanidinobutyric might make the mushrooms more potent than the current study suggests. A detailed mechanism of the compounds’ toxicity is still not clear, he says, but notes that the group is doing further research and believes that the amino acids might induce hypoglycemia that results in death.
Chemical & Engineering News
Copyright © 2012 American Chemical Society
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