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.
...
They immediately began preparing an application to the FDA for the emergency use of an investigational antidote – that if administered within 72 hours of ingestion can prevent liver damage and death in almost every patient who receives it.
The drug, called Silibinin, is derived from the milk thistle plant and given intravenously. It has been available in Europe for over 30 years, but here in the United States it has yet to be approved by the FDA, so it is not stocked in hospitals or pharmacies.
The result is that in order to obtain it for patients, an emergency use application must be submitted to the FDA for every patient who needs it, after which it is flown in by courier directly from the FDA laboratory in Philadelphia.
“This literally takes an army of people working after hours,” said Gholam. “There are tireless, really unsung heroes at the UH research office who make this happen for every patient – they have to do this over and over and over.” Forty-seven times in the last 10 years to be exact.
The biggest enemy in this process, says Gholam, is time. If the drug is administered after the 72-hour window closes, the chances of a full recovery drop dramatically.
Making licensed physicians jump through these hoops while risking their patients lives should be a criminal offense. Yes, it's great that this particular patient survived, but there needs to be a better cost benefit analysis for drug approval. Almost certainly, there are patients who have suffered permanent damage or death because of the difficulty of obtaining this drug. What benefit is there to making this drug so hard to get? How many people miss the time window because of these requirements? How safe does a drug need to be if result of not getting it is a 40% chance of death or a liver transplant?
"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, these protections exist because of several breakdowns in drug safety in the past, notably Elixir sulfanilamide and Thalidomide.
I'm not suggesting that there should be no improvements, I think there should be a conditional use waiver program that allows these drugs to be in the field. But suggesting that it should be criminal that it's not is over the top moralizing and provocation of outrage for little return.
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?
I would imagine you could create a shared medicine treaty group and structure it with explicit membership qualifications and then a voting on membership and long enough delay to make the membership politically tenable.
The FDA does not accept any studies conducted overseas as clinical evidence. They request studies to contain at least 50% US citizens and be analyzed by US certified physicians.
Now whether that leads to better outcomes or is just a protectionist measure for the local industry is anyone’s guess. A bit of both, I would imagine.
The cynic in me says that the FDA wants the company that makes the drug to put up the money for the studies, they won't do it for free and without any possibilities of kickbacks.
I think Thalidomide is exactly the wrong reason to not approve drugs like Silibinin and what is wrong with the drug system. Yes, it was a huge scandal. But we are not talking about a drung for general usage, especially not for taking as a healthy person. There should be entirely different approval paths for drugs which are to be taken in a live-and-death situation. Which can be clearly diagnosed. Especially, if it also has been approved and used for a long time in the EU.
>And there is little financial incentive by the company that owns the drug to invest in its research and development.
This is the real reason it hasn't been approved. If only we had some kind of system in place where profit wasn't the main, and often only, motivator for getting life-saving medications approved by the FDA.
> Those poisonings are rare – so gathering enough data to satisfy the safety and efficacy requirements of the FDA takes time.
Since we're talking about something that cause death or liver transplant to such an enormous proportion of the patients (for efficiency, you just need a sample of 6 cases to get a result with p<0.05).
> Those protections are immaterial when the patient is going to die anyway.
Only 40% are going to die or require a liver transplant. There is no a-priori reason to assume it won't make things even worse.
We have the recent experience of the early months of Covid. In retrospect, it is quite evident that over treatment, especially aggressive intubation and experimental drugs, caused more harm than good.
The question is always whether the proposed treatment is safe and effective. Safety, of course, should be relative to the condition being treated.
I think you're dramatically underselling how complicated and slow this "paperwork" really is. People on their death bed don't have the luxury of bureaucratic approval processes.
I understand full well how complicated it is. Speed is the challenge, not the lack of a process for this type of situation. Unfortunately, it is a hard one.
>Thalidomide is a very useful drug that is still prescribed today.
With a metric shit ton of caveats, that were outright denied until the public raised an unholy fuss with regulators to get it clamped down on in light of the severity of birth defects/reproductive complications it produces.
I was going to say the same thing. I'm sure the bill is in the high tens of thousands if not low 6 figures in the US. Would be curious if someone has a bill. It's probably $100 in Europe without insurance.
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.
The US healthcare system is all kinds of messed up, but this sounds like FUD territory. I was hospitalized for 12 days earlier this year for what ended up being a heart issue. Not as "exciting" as a stroke perhaps but I'd have ended up very dead without modern medicine. The total bill sent to insurance was $85k and I ended up having to pay $5k.
I feel sorry that you believe your experience is worth diminishing the experiences of others. I have my mother's bills to prove it. She had a bleeder causing damage the size of a golf ball. No operation performed. A week in the ICU, 2 admitted, and 6 in admitted rehab.
And I had a powered vehicle collision that cost ~$83k without any surgery. The care was so bad (waiting 4 hours for stitches) and when they wanted to admit me, I said to myself "fuck it, I want to get some real sleep at home where I won't be woken every 45 minutes just so they can pad the bill even more as an expensive hotel." I got up and walked out. Minus CT and MRI, I could've done what they did in 3 hours what took them 18. 3 broken bones (T-8, nose, and shoulder) and they kept pushing me to take opiates. The pain was tolerable because it was a high-energy impact with clean breaks.
Also, around 2016, I spoke with a young lady in coffee shop in Redding CA who had a nasal infusion pump with a small tube taped to her face. She was preparing her documentation to attend a bankruptcy hearing across the street. She had stage IV terminal cancer and the doctors and hospitals were trying to take everything she owned while she was alive. 62% of all bankruptcies are due to medical bills and 78% had some form of insurance that obvious didn't help them.
I suggest you might want to get out more and talk to people. The US healthcare system is a fucking racket. People with the privilege of good health insurance rarely get outside of their bubble because "they got theirs" and assume everyone else has the same opportunities and protections. That's not the reality.
Social security is 20% of your salary in Lithuania. 50€ if you're unemployed. Although it does cover healthcare, unemployment and part of retirement pensions. Probably something more, but I don't know further details.
I would bet my life that hospitals and doctors in Europe can't take everything you own while you're alive just because you require expensive cancer treatments. I wonder though if European patients are subtly not given the opportunities of expensive or experimental treatments to keep costs under control or if QALY "death panel" calculations are performed.
My late grandmother was often slighted and not offered treatment by VA medical personnel because of her age. It was disgusting, overt ageism beyond whether a particular treatment was suitable or not, she was treated as a second-class citizen not worth helping.
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.
In fact it’s to the insurance companies benefit to have the original bill be as insanely high as possible, before negotiating a “discount” and paying half - makes them look better and scares people from not having insurance.
Safety certifications tend to be blanket 'this thing is safe to treat this disease' things.
Whereas they should be 'in the last 10 years, 100 people were treated with this drug and 27% survived. 71 were not treated with the drug and 1% survived. You use your professional judgement to decide if it is suitable for your patient'.
The FDA shouldn't be doing blanket approvals or bans. They should be making the information available for medical professionals to make the decision themselves.
Maybe this is the only way to reliably make available a drug that is used nationwide on average less than 5 times a year? Most hospitals wouldn’t stock a drug that they’d likely never use.
By keeping stock centralized at the FDA they can keep enough on hand and rubber stamp the exception.
Isn't the whole idea of requiring FDA approval to protect patients from harmful or ineffective drugs? If having and administering whatever drugs you wanted was legal, then how can anyone be protected? No doubt, they're still getting around to approving it but are just too slow and have this exception process precisely to save people's lives until they get it done properly.
Without wanting to be callous, 47 people in 10 years, then look at common cold, flu, covid etc. It should be very low on the priority list if you optimise for saving lives.
> 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)
The funny thing is that 100 mg of Silybi mariani fructus extactum siccum is OTC in Poland used for liver problems that people might have after ingesting a heavy meal.
And it's been for decades without any safety issues.
Granted that in cases of mushroom poisoning it's given only in hospital setting probably through IV, probably in much higher doses.
But those people would die without it. Any reasonable safety profile of this drug is better than safety profile of untreated deathcap poisoning.
> This literally takes an army of people working after hours,” said Gholam. “There are tireless, really unsung heroes at the UH research office who make this happen for every patient – they have to do this over and over and over.” Forty-seven times in the last 10 years to be exact.
Ohh, the poor guys have to hand in 4.7 forms per year to get access to an unapproved medicine they need.
I would've thought it was satire, but it seems you're serious? Amazing.
Oh, no, the amazing person is definitely you here.
Here's a life-saving drug that US pharmacists (only) are not allowed to stock; a drug that saves lives but only if given in a small time windows; and to get this drug you need to fill out a form and simply hope that someone happens to be working at whatever time you start to die.
And here you are, making fun of people who think this is a ridiculous idea!
Yes, let's let doctors give out unapproved drugs whenever they want so they can finally properly profit by making their own premium drug brands. Really smart ideas, i totally agree.
My previous astonishment was clearly misplaced, these doctors know best after all.
Why is something that's been approved in Europe for 30 years still waiting for FDA approval in the first place?
If they issue the medication immediately after the form is submitted, without further inquiry or scrutiny (which is actually good in the case of something this urgent), why are they even bothering keeping it under such lock and key anyway?
That's what would sound like satire to anyone without an unflinching faith in the importance of a nanny state.
I assume it doesn't because U.S.-government-level "inquiry and scrutiny" takes at least an order of magnitude longer than 72 hours. If they're getting this done in time for it to be useful, it's just being rubber-stamped.
Do you sincerely think the EU would keep a drug available for common use if everyone who took it died? If not, drop the red herring and try to have a halfway serious discussion.
I do think there is patient tracking after the fact, and that the reason for exemption is examined.
>Do you sincerely think the EU would keep a drug available for common use if everyone who took it died?
No, but this is the type of data the FDA will collect and verify. It is not an approved product so they don't have this data tracking on it like they would for a normal product.
I guess I dont think your central point is credible. You dont think that a form can be examined to see if it has a doctors approval and valid need within 72 hours?
Here is the process if you want to educate yourself:
I mean the argument was that that "they have to keep filling out these forms, causing lots of overtime", that was the argument I pointed out to be unreasonably dumb considering it's less then 5 times per year.
So... The one that's doing that is pretty much you.
None of us can argue about wherever the drug should be approved by now, as we don't know why it isn't yet. You'd have to first get a statement from the agency before that discussion can take place
FDA will consider real world data and real world evidence in regulatory decision making. If this has been in use in the EU for 30 years, then where is the data?
Robert Califf (FDA commissioner) has a funny saying, “In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
It's not criminal to be cautious about approving drugs. Remember the people affected have purposely eaten a wild mushroom -- they risked their own lives first.
It should be criminal given the immense harm that it causes. The FDA’s single minded obsession with liability holds back medical advances that could save lives.
Well, given they were injecting untested and unproven SARS-CoV-2 "vaccine" which wasn't even a vaccine till they changed the definition, they could do a traditional medicine plant despite the mild toxicity and the absence of other clinical evidence...
But why FDA is to blame? Just get it from nearby euro-drugstore and do your unlicensed fix.
"derived from the milk thistle plant" likely involves more than just "eat some powered plant"; Wikipedia seems to indicate it involves more purification steps than the supplement form of things.
The blurb notes this drug is given intravenously; it's also possible that there's plenty of it in a raw milk thistle, but eating it doesn't work. (Or, of course, that there isn't much if any in a raw milk thistle, and eating it doesn't work.)
Dose is probably really low if you just used dried milk thistle and you need to refining and purify it to take via an IV. Same goes with acetylcysteine for Tylenol a overdose, you need to get it via an IV and you can’t just take the over the counter supplement.
Also, every household that has Tylenol should have, and co-administer, N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC) because it's hepatoprotective. The stinky sulfurous supplement that the FDA partially banned.
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?) around foraging, when in fact there's a whole universe of flavors and textures to be had from wild mushrooms that are simply better, and more fun, than the grocery store.
Now I wonder if this thing only exists in Hungary, but here there are lots of mushroom checking stations, typically near markets, where an expert checks your bag of mushrooms. They have an official license from the food safety authority and there is a central register for these mushroom experts.
My dad always brought the stuff we picked there, it was close by enough and it's just a totally normal thing here.
I would imagine it would be a nightmare to do this in the US due to legal liabilities.
I can confirm that we do not have such a thing in the US. I wonder how this began in Hungary. I’m sure plenty of mycologists would be eager to have this kind of role in the US.
> The idea of a novice forager using an app to identify mushrooms is... unconscionable! Like... breathtakingly stupid.
Out of curiosity, have you used any of the apps?
They're really good at flora, and include identification of fungi because they are outdoors and attached to soil and flora. They greatly amplify the most passive and casual interest to something far beyond the tools employed professionals would have. Even the state (but thats a low bar, admittedly).
But the identification isn't for eating things. But knowing that people do that, and for mushrooms I would say there is a case for a warning label in the apps, after positive identification of some things.
So to be clear the app didnt say it was edible or makes any recommendations about eating them, it only said it potentially looks like its from a family of mushrooms which the author found out included edible mushrooms.
Technically the person themselves made the leap to calling it edible.
Although it wouldn’t hurt for the flora identification app to have warnings about not eating things unless you’re very certain and have expertise on the subject. Or make it clear it’s a well informed guess not a perfect identification.
I've used the apps for both flora and mushrooms, and they're much worse at mushroom identification. I always tell beginners to, at most, use an app to figure out where in an ID book to start looking.
Curiosity: do you find that you (at 30+ years) are so good at identification in the wild that you don’t find any “bad” specimens once you get them home, or do you still catch some outliers where you needed to look at them more closely? Or does the process involve taking them home for closer examination?
To be honest I don't recall the last time I've ever accidentally picked up a poisonous specimen along with the good ones I was intending to pick. At this point it's such second-nature that telling apart an edible vs. poisonous mushroom is like telling a bottle of milk from a bottle of Drano.
And yet I still examine each one at home before putting it in the pot.
The other thing is that the truly deadly varieties, such as the subject of this article - Amanita phalloides, are really not that hard to avoid. When you're a novice forager, there are plenty of varieties that don't look remotely like Amanita, and are much easier to differentiate.
There are some hardcore foragers who even consume certain varieties of Amanita (some of which are edible!), but to me this would be too much of a hassle, since it would involve spore prints and maybe even microscopy of the spores to be absolutely sure.
Amanita sec caesarae doesn't require spore prints or microscopy to be affirmatively ID'd as safe. You have to check for the presence of a few characteristics, but it's a fairly safe ID for experienced foragers. Blushers and grisettes, however... I've seen too many people in mushroom groups misidentify those to ever recommend them to others.
Using that rule of thumb, you would successfully avoid Amanita virosa (destroying angel), but you could still get poisoned by Amanita phalloides (death cap) which has a pale-green cap.
I don't endorse any rules-of-thumb for foraging, but a much better differentiator for beginners is whether the mushroom has pores vs. gills under the cap. There are virtually no deadly varieties that have pores.
Note that there's at least one, and that a number of them will still make you sick.
Put a few common pored edibles (Laetiporus sp., Cantharellus sp., Grifola frondosa, etc.) in your notes for sure though, with basic descriptions, as even their few remote lookalikes (at least pored ones -- some people think Omphalotus sp. look like Cantharellus for some reason) are just going to give you a moderate stomach upset at worst, and may be edible themselves.
"Old school" foragers typically stick to a few mushrooms to be safe. Meaning, they have quite an expertise on 3 or 4 kinds of mushrooms (or, even more likely, just a couple of them) and are staying away from anything else, especially, if there is a similar, poisonous mushroom. (At least, this is what all I happen to know are doing.) Also, if you aren't 100% confident, stay away from it. (And there is the real problem with apps, since lack of confidence is the entire raison d'être of these apps.)
This is the way. Grandma teaches you her 3 or 4 favorites, you find them for her, and then she checks them herself. My wife is passing on this passion to our kids and my 4 year old already knows (1) which are good and (2) the only way to eat a wild mushroom is on the plate, after mommy checked and cooked it.
When I was younger I would go foraging and I would indeed stick to just the few species of very common mushroom that grew in the woods near me, that I could recognise for sure, with very distinct characteristics.
Then I moved to another city just a few hundreds of km away, and I couldn't collect many mushrooms anymore. The mushrooms variaties were quite different. The ones I could recognise were not so common anymore, and I didn't know the other ones. I stopped foraging now, because I don't have the urge to learn mushrooms again.
America has thousands, if not millions, of invisible people living from the land and amongst the trees -- but you're right that our city dwellers don't know many wild plants.
The most obvious examples are our two major trails, the Pacific Coast and the Appalachian, which take a full year to hike and are done by tens of thousands annually.
I've only eaten wild mushrooms once. They were picked by a friend I trusted who had been picking them for 20+ years, and he ate them at the same time I did.
He damn sure was not using an app on his phone to identify them.
I do hunt mushrooms occasionally, and an app is useful if you understand the limitations. If the app gives you a name, the next thing to do is consult a mushroom book to learn if there is a risk of mixups with poisenous species.
In Western Europe, for instance, there is are edible wild champignons that are very similar “groene knol ameniet”, which is deadly.
I recently read that fatalities are on the rise because east europeans that migrate here look for wild champignons but do not know about the poisenous lookalike: it does not grow in the forests they grew up in.
Every region has some mushrooms species that you can learn to easily recognize and that don’t have “evil twins”. You should be aware that this varies by area.
So apps can be a useful tool but a good book that covers the region where you pluck is essential.
The problem is that the culture of secrecy around mushrooms makes it uncomfortable to ask those questions in a new place. I learned mushrooms in a certain place, and even after 10 years in a different place I have not learned the local specialities.
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:
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.
Depends. Certain varieties like penny bun can taste superb, and in most areas you're extremely unlikely to confuse them with anything poisonous or even inedible.
There's no risk to eating many carefully foraged mushrooms. Many of them have no toxic lookalikes, or are so easily distinguished that the risk is essentially zero.
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., then identifying different varieties becomes as clear as identifying a baseball vs. a tennis ball.
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.
It it worse than not being an expert on local mushrooms.
You can get fooled because you can find mushrooms that resembles mushroom from you home region, that you know to be edible.
E.g:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvopluteus_gloiocephalus#Edi...
==
In the United States, there have been several cases of Asian immigrants collecting and eating death caps (Amanita phalloides), under the mistaken assumption that they were Volvariella.
==
books with photos, very in-depth descriptions, pictures and descriptions sent to friends who also forage, and when all else fails, spore samples.
I've only had to make it to spore samples 6-7 times because I couldn't identify with the first three methods. I will note that I never ate any of the ones I took spore samples of - because I was then able to correctly identify them as poisonous (or close enough that I wasn't willing to take the chance).
Just go after a specific kind of mushroom and one that doesn’t have any close lookalikes and it’s very easy to safely pick mushrooms. Next level up from picking a single one is to pick a few known kinds which all have distinct features that can’t be confused with others.
I pick only boletus, chanterellus (which has a bad lookalike in North America but it’s not really that close and where I am in Europe there is no really poisonous lookalike at all). Even easier late in autumn when you can pick various cratherellus and there are almost no other mushrooms at all.
Yes, but not one I worry about. It’s both not known to be very poisonous (it’s surely eaten quite a lot) and it’s very easily distinguished from the real thing.
I'm from Ohio, and even before the apps, it was common to hear stories about people being poisoned by mushrooms. It's also relatively well known (though not well enough, obviously) that there are several species of toxic mushrooms that look nearly identical to edible ones. Perhaps people think an app is going to be infallible. I really think app stores ought to pull any mushroom-identifying app that doesn't come with a prominent warning. I live in Hungary now. Here we have mushroom identification centers at the local markets where we can bring mushrooms collected in the wild to be identified by professional mycologists. Maybe Ohio needs this as well.
I'm no fan of the FDA, but it's worth noting Europeans said the same about thalidomide and thankfully America didn't listen.
In 1960, Kelsey was hired by the FDA in Washington, D.C. At that time, she "was one of only seven full-time and four young part-time physicians reviewing drugs"[4] for the FDA. One of her first assignments at the FDA was to review an application by Richardson-Merrell for the drug thalidomide (under the tradename Kevadon) as a tranquilizer and painkiller with specific indications to prescribe the drug to pregnant women for morning sickness. Although it had been previously approved in Canada and more than 20 European and African countries,[8] she withheld approval for the drug and requested further studies.[3] Despite pressure from thalidomide's manufacturer Grünenthal, Kelsey persisted in requesting additional information to explain an English study that documented peripheral neuritis,[9] a nervous system side effect.[4] She also requested data showing the drug was not harmful to the fetus.[9]
Kelsey's insistence that the drug should be fully tested prior to approval was vindicated when the births of deformed infants in Europe were linked to thalidomide ingestion by their mothers during pregnancy.[10][11] Researchers discovered that the thalidomide crossed the placental barrier and caused serious birth defects.[7]
This is why America does independent review of results obtained from Europe.
Silibinin is the active ingredient in milk thistle, a supplement available at almost any health food store. Do doctors not know this or are they just letting people die rather than prescribe an OTC nutraceutical? Or is there some reason it absolutely must be delivered intravenously? That seems unlikely since it is orally bioavailable.
Edit: I found this, which suggests that it should work in theory, but intense vomiting from the poisoning probably makes it not possible to take a large dose orally: http://bayareamushrooms.org/poisonings/silymarin.html
OTC supplements in the U.S. are also notoriously under-regulated. Impurities and false labeling abound. I don't see a medical professional using them for a critically ill patient if there is a viable alternative. In fact supplements already cause 20% of liver failures nationwide: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/liver-damage-from-sup...
Some time ago, I somehow ran into a YouTuber who talks about foraging in the UK talking about how effective these apps are[1]. Each one of them misidentified at least one plant, and two of three gave incorrect (or misleading) results for the deadly plant he tested.
However he made the very interesting point that having an app tell you if something is edible is a completely incorrect starting point for foraging because the main thing you get from using a reference book is that you are forced to notice that there are many plants that may look similar but are different (meaning you are more aware that your task is more about differentiation than identification, since botany is a bit fuzzy around the edges) and might seriously differ in their toxicity. None of these apps have a feature to say "it looks like this edible plant but if the angle you took the photo from was slightly off, it's definitely poisonous because the group of plants that look like this only only one or two edible members and everything else will definitely kill you". Some list confidence percentages but there were examples where the percentages were far too pessimistic or optimistic for a certain match, making them not particularly useful.
My impression is that these apps are developed using the same "move fast and break things" model as most other things these days, which definitely seems like the best model to use when making an app that may or may not lead to people's deaths (not your fault of course, because you waived all liability in your ToS). /s
Wow. Who would take the liability of an app such as this? Regardless of how many disclaimers you'd have to agree to I could easily see a jury holding the creator of the app liable for a horrible death like that.
I dunno, watching the video linked by this use [0], I think the apps (aside from Google Lens) do a fairly okay job of being clear that they aren't as sure on their identification and that they're about casualness, not "safe to eat or not safe to eat."
While the article cites some persons who ate poisonous mushrooms because an app said they weren't poisonous, ultimately it will come down to "Did the app sell itself as telling you what's safe to eat and what's not?"
From the video, I'm particularly harsh towards Google on this as it doesn't seem to include the confidence level or analysis process and instead focused on showing a result and even trying to sell you something based on the result. This does seem like it's the wrong approach that will get people killed, with thoughts like "well Google thinks it's this, and it's even trying to sell me some, so must be okay."
For the others, you can see warnings in the apps about eating identified stuff, you can see how confident it is in the analysis, and they at least appear to be considering things like the region you're in when making an analysis.
I think it would be fairly defensible based on the warnings and preparation that a reasonable person would not be expected to take the identification as a go-ahead to eat something. That unreasonable persons take unreasonable actions as a result of these apps wouldn't really change the legal interpretation, but of course maybe it can be persuasive in other directions.
At first I shared the same opinion as you that these are dangerous apps, but watching what the apps do in the linked video, the non-google ones are actually pretty acceptable in my opinion. I would prefer they include a few more warnings though when there is low confidence matching or when there is conflicting matching just to remind the person using the app "hey, btw, a lot of plants can kill you. Don't eat this, I'm just an app."
It's literally part of the iphone camera, if you weren't aware. Not disagreeing with you, but acknowledging that it's pretty hard to prevent these apps with how accessible machine learning is today, despite accuracy still being difficult for many things.
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.
Even if that does waive their legal liability (which I'm not sure it does), there is a moral obligation to try to not endanger the many people that the app developers know are going to disregard that warning. It would be intellectually dishonest for the developers of such apps to pretend that everyone who uses their app actually obeys that warning (there are plenty of YouTube videos instructing people to forage for things using these apps).
I feel like there's still some sort of line here. I'm sure the developers aren't surprised that some users ignore the warning... but does that mean they failed their moral obligation?
Did the developers of google maps fail their moral obligation if they know some users will follow google map's directions, despite their GPS being broken, and go down wrong streets, walk into walls, get lost without water, etc?
Did the developers of the bird scooter app, which tells you to wear a helmet (but developers know that warning will be ignored), fail their moral obligation since they know some scooter riders won't actually know how to ride and will fall and be injured?
Do the developers of competitive sport apps, like strava, fail a moral obligation since they know some people will injure themselves trying to get on a leaderboard?
Like, I agree that there's a moral obligation for developers. But on the other hand, I feel like you can expect some baseline of "bad users who misuse the app horribly", and it feels like if that's enough to obligate you to not build said app, you just can't build anything. Just about anything can be misused, and at the scale of most apps, it's reasonable to expect it will be.
Is there something about plant identification that makes it more special than the other apps above?
I think you're missing how many steps are necessary.
Those apps for identifying your local poplars and evergreens.
This person pointed it at a mushroom, picked the mushroom, used it as a topping and digested it.
I would be for an additional warning label when mushrooms are identified. But we need more people on the same page about the apps themselves, if you haven't used them I think you might be out of the loop.
We need to stop pretending that developers are liable for the idiocy of users.
There was a time when you could publish a book on how to make a pipe bomb and nothing would happen to you. Now the wrath of the government descends on you as if you broke the law by having knowledge and telling it to someone.
The plant app I use [0] gives a percentage confidence rather than saying "this is definitely X or Y". I've found it pretty accurate on the various plants and trees I've used it to ID. But I limit my foraging to nuts and berries I already know and generally only use the app to increase my recognition factor of what else grows around me.
I do like mushrooms but I think it's just a step too far into 'Russian Roulette' territory to risk trying to forage for those. Eating something which might make you sick for a day or two is one thing. But risking eating something which might kill you or require a liver transplant, if you get it wrong, is a bit too scary for me. The only mushroom I'm confident in my ability to ID is psilocybin.
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 incredibly subtle differences that you should trust nobody but a human expert to identify.
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.
These identification apps are selling incomplete information where the need for full information about toxins is obvious.
Nobody was ever surprised that a knife hurt somebody or had cause to accuse a knife maker that their product could cut things in a way a consumer wouldn’t know about.
The issue isn’t that a tool can be harmful but that a danger to the producer of a product would be obligated to know and share isn’t obvious to the consumer without previous knowledge. If you’re selling information you must know your audience.
Any human teaching you to identify mushrooms will teach you about the risks of poison right away. “I didn’t tell you what you needed to know but you should have known better” only works when it’s reasonable for you to know better. General audience mushroom identifiers shouldn’t be expected to know how easily a misidentification could kill them, plus it’s just not difficult to do.
This doesn’t match the situation with knives unless you can find me someone who really does need to be warned about knives and isn’t, say, 4 years old.
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.
We don't know if it made "the problem" worse. It certainly made it worse for the guy getting poisoned. But it's possible that for each person getting poisoned, there's a couple not getting poisoned because the app correctly ID'd a mushroom.
Or a hundred people who have their intellectual curiosity satisfied. I recently used Google Lens to ID (with like 75% confidence) a mushroom I had zero intention of eating either way.
Mushroom identifying books have all of the same issues. I guess one could make an argument that it's unconscionable to publish those, too.
A very important fact you need when identifying mushrooms is the consequences of misidentifying them. You don’t have “nice things” when you fail to raise this crucially important point.
Every responsible resource will be full of this kind of caution and neglecting it should be criminal. It isn’t covering your ass or putting an obligatory warning label on everything, a primary point of interest in mushroom identification is toxicity. If you don’t do it you kill people, not like maybe but certainly.
Eh, no, you're inventing a narrative. The guy knew the downside actually or he wouldn't have bothered to use the app to identify it. He knew the downsides, he rolled the dice, he lost. His wife knew the downsides, didn't roll the dice, and he thankfully lived maybe because of that.
You also don't know that the app doesn't warn users that it shouldn't be used in life and death situations, but I'll maintain that it shouldn't have to. To avoid "criminal negligence" accusations.
If I have a rock identification app does it need to say not to eat rocks to avoid liability for dental damages? If I sell bicycles do I have to tell you that rolling downhill fast can cause death or injury?
I think you’re misunderstanding the point here. Mushroom identification isn’t the same as bike selling or rock identification because the purpose of those isn’t to avoid danger. Almost the entire purpose is to reduce the “rolling the dice” factor in mushroom eating. In fact, that is precisely why traditional mushroom identification has such a wealth of deep knowledge, such as noticing ecological location, weather patterns, neighboring plants, etc. to reduce this as much as possible.
It is more comparable if you built an app to identify cancerous moles, except it produced false negatives significantly more often than an actual doctor, leading to people dying. This isn’t a “roll the dice” thing.
I don't think the intended purpose of the app is to tell you whether a mushroom or plant is edible or not, I think it's merely meant to identify plants, fungi, and other things for a hobbyist who's into botany and the like. I could definitely see where you're coming from if the app advertised itself as a "a great wilderness survival companion app" or something like that... But we're pretty much speculating, here. This is specific as the story gets
> he used the plant identification app
Which I think is a different category of app altogether from a fungus/plant edibility app.
It doesn’t matter what the app intends to do. You should not under any circumstances identify mushrooms without loudly and clearly spelling out specific dangers.
It would probably be wise to do so, especially after you've learned that it could save lives. But to decide after the fact that it's criminal negligence is not a healthy outcome. I'm all for trying to make sure people don't hurt themselves, but the app makers should not be legally responsible for the decision that was made here, period.
> You do not trust a consumer app with life and death decisions, ...
What about an app that tells you how to pump gas while smoking a cigarette? That seems like pretty obvious negligent design. In California at least that opens you up to a lawsuit. [0]
Yeah that seems like a huge oversight. Every mushroom field guide book ive seen very specifically called out any potential look-a-likes for edible mushrooms and gave extra warning on mushrooms that are particularly difficult to positively identify.
Instead of a general mushroom identification app, it could be a poisonous mushroom identification app. The dataset would only include poisonous mushrooms, and it will be made clear that it is not exhaustive. This could be useful to rule out some mushrooms.
"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."
Okay, but there must be data, since the EU approved it based on something, right?
You mean like when Europe approved thalidomide but the US said “just because they approved it isn’t good enough” and saved tens of thousands of babies from birth defects?
It's true that the "European FDA" sometimes approves things they have to recall later. But the American FDA also does that. Only rejecting by all medications can you avoid that.
My thought is that medical science works the same way in Europe as in the US, so if it was a scientific matter, approvals would be "portable".
I think a model that explains things better is that the approvals are political/regulatory. And I wish the were scientific.
If there's one thing I've learned in my life about mushrooms, it's that there are way, way more varieties than you think, and for any 1 there are 20 that look the same.
I used to hang out on r/mycology, and even experts would ask tons of questions before even making a guess.
There's no way in hell an app can do this reliably, and while I hate to say it, I hope people sue them into oblivion. This isn't something benign like hotdog or not, or bird ID. This has fatal consequences...
’But unbeknownst to many, Ohio is home to some of the world’s deadliest mushrooms -- and they can look a whole lot like their edible cousins.
A recent rash of nearly lethal poisonings have experts worried that mobile naturalist apps may be lulling otherwise cautious citizens into a false sense of security
‘
The fungal species are not concentrated in Ohio, they are somewhat invasive as I understand it.
"The death cap mushroom is an invasive species from Europe, now present on every continent except Antarctica. It became such a world traveler because humans spread the mushroom’s spores around like glitter at a kids’ glitter party...
"...the death cap made a sudden appearance in 1938 and became increasingly common after that year."
I find it hard to imagine anyone relying on an app to determine whether or not a wild mushroom is edible or not. The poisonous mushrooms (particularly the widely distributed and complex Amanita types) have some of the most insidious biological toxins known, in particular alpha-amanitin, which has a really nasty delayed-action effect:
It's mode of action is so unique (binds RNA polymerase, so destroying liver and kidney protein synthesis and leading to widespread cell death) that it's used in molecular biology labs for the study of protein synthesis.
Maybe some of the more obvious edible types (boletes, chantrelles, some others) are fairly easy to identify, but even there they have stomach-upset causing relatives. Anything even vaguely similar to Amanita should be viewed with caution (there are closely similar edible types, no thanks). A few good books with lots of pictures, close attention to things like spore prints, going with someone with a lot of experience, that's the best introduction.
There's no wiggle room. You need to be 1000% certain of identification, if you decide to eat a mushroom.
That's how I've been doing it for the last decade. I forage a lot of mushrooms, but don't consume anything I'm not sure of.
Also, there are "beginner" mushrooms, that don't have any dangerous look-alikes, such as the famous "chicken of the woods" (laetiporus sulphureus). You can't really go wrong with mushroom like these.
My farmers' market has a mushroom guy that brings in things that I've never seen before.
Some of them get expensive and a few I've found rather unpleasant.
There is absolutely no way that I could find these things myself, so I would suggest a dealer like this if you are in an area large enough to support one.
Yeah, I've got foraging with a friend that knew what she was doing, and she really only did it for a fun excuse for a hike and bought her mushrooms at the farmer's market. Granted, I'm in Portland, so mushrooms are exceptional up here, but there's just no way you'll find the quality and quantity the pros do.
I've grown mushrooms (from known spores) before and it's interesting. The problem with it is that most mushrooms only grow on very specific materials, eg. only on oak wood or straw.
How do you cook them? They are pretty cheap here so I tried number of times this summer and found the flavour just not worth the cleanup hassle. Maybe they are different in NA. IIRC the traditional method here is to boil them and then cook with bacon and onion, so chances of their flavour is 0.
Many people just stick to the very easily identified mushrooms with few or no real look-a-likes or atleast mushrooms who's poisonous look-a-likes aren't that deadly but just make you feel shitty.
Morels are super popular around me because they are very easy to identify and false morels aren't very hard to differentiate once you have seen true morels a couple times. They may look similar to someone who has never seen or picked morels before, but they have very distinct differences once you know what to look for.
At the very least someone should learn what the extremely deadly mushrooms, like death caps or destroying angels, look like so they know what to most definitely avoid. Especially with the delayed reactions which might prevent them from connecting their illness with the mushrooms they ate a day or two before.
A good field guide will specifically call out similar but deadly mushrooms when referencing edible mushrooms and are very clear on the dangers of misidentification and the minimum neccessary identification required. Some mushrooms require a microscrope, but many others just require you to identify certain distinguishing features.
In Switzerland 'community halls' near forests usually have mushroom checking days where you can bring them in for free. Not sure how this works in other countries
Depending where you are, that worry might be greater with foraged berries, mushrooms etc. I live in an area that's been heavily industrialised for over 150 years. The soil at my mom's place when tested had too much lead and PCBs for safety. And not too long ago they found leaking barrels of nuclear waste from the 1940s in a lovely wooded area just a couple blocks over from my old primary school. Only God knows what's in the soil here, unless you test it.
Several comments here advise getting a good mushroom identification book instead of relying on plant id apps for foraging. Do you have any recommendations? And more generally, how would you go about assessing the trustworthiness of any such book?
Edit: this is the definitive resource for serious amateur mushroom enthusiasts in North America. It has a wealth of information on understanding the identifying characteristics of mushrooms, as well as keys to aid in the identification of many common genera and species. It's one of those books I find entertaining just to open and read at random. YMMV.
I think this gives people the wrong impression that mushroom foraging is dangerous. It isn't. Anyone can quickly learn to identify the safe edible species around them. But the key is, you have to understand that you should know upfront what species around you, in your current season, are edible and eat only exactly those species.
For example, almost anyone can learn to identify chicken of the woods, morels, oysters, and maitake and safely pick them with very minimal training.
Trusting some app without context is an obviously stupid move IMO though and not surprising that people are getting hurt if that's how they are approaching foraging.
> the key is, you have to understand that you should know upfront what species around you, in your current season, are edible and eat only exactly those species
This is missing a very important factor, which is that there are some edible species with highly toxic lookalikes. These lookalikes are quite common in Ohio, hence why poisonings from misidentified mushrooms are also common.
There are two, but I'm guessing you're not basing this off of actual knowledge. If you avoid those two, you can forage dozens of other edibles easily. It's not hard to avoid those two (and their entire genus, though there are some easily-distinguished edibles in the genus as well).
The whole point is you shouldn't just run around picking stuff up, taking a run at an identification, and then popping it in your mouth. You should go out already knowing what you are willing to pick based off of what can safely be picked in your area. Safe here means no edible look a likes (or that you know how to differentiate with confidence)
I am an novice mycologist and I just find it ridiculous that theres people out there picking mushrooms, cooking and eating them without ever having the knowledge of the species of mushrooms that grow in their region. Anyone picking and eating mushys without knowning the harmful species in their regions are simply asking for it. Do it and its only a matter of time before you or your app make a mistake and you end up in the hospital or a coffin. But regardless I'll break down the best practices in identifying mushys.
1. When ID'ing mushrooms look for 3 points of comparison. Never go on one comparison. Any good mushy ID's will document size shape color smell bruising color.
2. Use more than 1 set of eyes. Just because your convinced doesn't mean your right. Post pictures to a forum and get some other eyes on the specimen and make sure your ID is confirmed.
3. From my experience the best place to start and ID is the medium its growing in. Soil Wood Excreta Moist Dry Sunny Time of Day. Find as many points of comparison as possible and when in doubt DONT EAT THE GD THING!
Foraging and telling apart edible mushrooms from the non-edible ones seems like a nice hobby to have. Are there any good reliable books that I can read to get started?
Almost definitely, but which one depends on where you live since species vary so drastically from place to place. The best way to find out is to look for a Facebook group for foraging in your state or city and ask which books are best for there. Many areas also have good beginner programs or events that teach some basics of a few easy edibles that have no toxic lookalikes.
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.
It's trivially easy to avoid toxic species, though. If you put in a tiny amount of effort into learning and limit yourself to thinks without toxic lookalikes (or put in more effort into learning), you are not risking liver failure and hospital time.
Why do people cook food and not buy it only from restaurants with rigorous health and safety checks in place? Could avoid lot of food poisonings that way.
You look at the woods differently when you hunt for mushrooms. Your whole vision changes. You see the exact same things as, say, a hiker, but you process it entirely differently.
It's a gamified experience of the wilderness, too, in some ways.
It provides many people a connection to their culture and ancestry.
It's a literal connection to the earth. Besides the amazing health benefits of mushrooms, I'm sure your microbiome gets a boost.
Mushrooms and herbs both have plenty of potent phytochemicals that have impressive effects on the body, often for good, sometimes not. When I gather mushrooms or herbs for my own consumption, I have complete control over the supply chain and am confident that I'm consuming reasonable subclinical doses. I have a healthy distrust for supplements of mushrooms and herbs in the US; they're poorly regulated, the supply chain is totally opaque; rarely can you know anything about the age, quality, harvesting conditions, etc., or even if you really have the herb or dried mushroom claimed, much less the actual dose of any chemical in there. Sure, I don't know the actual chemical contents of my blue vervain or turkey tail or whatever either, but I also know I'm not grinding it up and chowing down on a concentrated dose.
Of course accurate identification of the plant or mushroom is important, as can be understanding of how growing conditions affect the plant and how preparation should be carried out (Kentucky coffee tree seeds are nice legumes if boiled a couple times, can kill cows if just left in the water trough in the sun; amanita muscaria can be boiled several times and eaten or pickled then eaten).
> It's a gamified experience of the wilderness, too, in some ways.
I sometimes collect trash from the woods near me and weirdly enough the feeling in the brain of finding a good mushroom is very similar to the feeling of finding a plastic bottle to collect.
Part of the reason I own woods in the first place is for the food it provides - berries, nuts, mushrooms, herbs, wild grapes, maple syrup, not to mention deer. We aren't even heavy collectors, but still when I priced it out last year we probably foraged about 3000 dollars worth of various foods. Once you add in some gardening, plant some fruit trees, raise a few chickens, do some bartering with and purchasing from other folks with farms in the area... you start to wonder if you even need a grocery store.
I have mild and pedestrian taste for mushrooms and I’m satisfied by grocery offerings, but no there aren’t plenty of options at the grocery store. Some different presentations of button mushrooms is common, and maybe shiitakes. More varieties are sometimes available at some farmers markets, generally cultivated, and even still they don’t offer many varieties found in the wild.
It’s not the potential risk. Mushroom hunters are usually both very careful and very knowledgeable, or at least very careful to defer to people who are very knowledgeable. And a lot of them are either chefs or supplying chefs. For everyone else I t’s mostly because the variety available is so much more limited than you portrayed, and because mushroom hunting is a hobby some people enjoy either for its own sake or for the context of being in the woods to forage for that’s own sake.
My area is probably exceptional, but you can get it from the people at the farmer's market that focus exclusively on mushroom foraging. Even when they're selling the same thing as even premium grocery stores, the gap in quality is very apparent.
It's fun, it's an outdoors activity, and as far as I know you can't really get the mushrooms you find locally in the grocery store. Using an app to identify mushrooms, however, is a terrifying thought. Maybe it speaks more to people's conceptions of the capabilities of modern technology.
If you want to get into foraging, there are some really easy to identify safe ones without dangerous lookalikes. Get a good identification book on the topic. Don't listen to random strangers on the Internet, and don't trust apps.
There's no risk of agony and death from foraging many edible species. If I'm foraging big orange pored shelf mushrooms, for example, my risk of death is zero. This is like saying "what's the upside of drugs when some of them kill you?!"
There are countless places in life where people do elective activities that would be potentially deadly if they didn't have a base level of knowledge, and in none of those is the general expectation that people will make the cutoff "where the risk of that error is the lowest."
Why? Because it's not that hard to figure out whether you're misestimating your level of knowledge if you actually do things to attempt that verification.
If you're not going to attempt that, yes -- you should stay away from virtually all things that have ever killed anyone, ever.
You do a risk-benefit tradeoff. Here, the risk massively outweighs the benefit. So you have to be absolutely certain you're not mistaken. This is very different from activities with low probability risks and/or considerably larger benefits.
It takes an incredibly small amount of research and a miniscule amount of care to nullify all of the risk of death. If you've ever seen a picture of either you are simply not, under any circumstances, going to confuse Laetiporus cinncinatus or any of the handful of for any deadly species. If you're using an ID book, you've just made it basically impossible to confuse anything outside of a couple of genera with a deadly species, and the book will make sure you know what the lookalikes are, even if they aren't at all toxic.
I know people who self-admittedly overcorrect and refrain from picking even a few easily-distinguished mushrooms that happen to be vaguely similar colors and shapes to deadly mushrooms, but the idea that you need to not pick any mushrooms at all, ever, in order to eliminate the risk is silly.
Picking wild mushrooms is not done (except by those who haven't done the trivial amount of info-gathering that is actually necessary) by gathering lots of different mushrooms and then identifying them and eating the ones that appear to be edible species. It isn't done by taking a field guide out and IDing mushrooms from scratch and then eating the ones that look like the edible ones in the book. It is done by learning species one or two at a time, along with all of their potential lookalikes. People who do this and start with easy mushrooms will encounter far more risk both from getting to the foraging area and from walking around in it than they will from the mushrooms.
I know you are more exclaiming than asking, or it reads that way, but it is seriously a lifestyle. Many mushrooms are only foraged as there just aren't farmers, but past that, it is kind of a prestige culture. Pride, and generations of knowing "the spots"
I read it as curiously exclaiming, as in “I don’t understand and have preconceived contrarian views but I might be missing something”, which is a really good “change my mind” introduction.
Wannabe mushroom foragers spend plenty of energy trying to identify what is edible, but they also need to spend that same amount of energy (if not more) in understanding what is not edible.
X-identification apps are utter garbage. Almost all of them fail critically on simple things. The rock identification apps are some of the absolute worst.
It is fall and mushroom picking time! Here is my simple advice:
The first mushrooms you should get to know in your area are the deadly ones. When you find a mushroom that looks like an edible one, temper your enthusiasm and be realistic. Mistakes are made when people really want to find an edible one. If it definitely doesn't look like a deadly one and might be the edible you identify, first try a small amount and see how it sits with you. Most are just indigestible and give stomach aches. If it looks anything like the deadly ones, when it doubt, toss it out.
The best advice I ever heard about mushroom foraging was to find someone who's been doing it a long time, possibly from your local community college, who will take you on walks and teach what to look for and where to look. Repeat any time you move or want to forage in a new place.
That's really good advice. Even perfectly edible mushrooms can give you adverse effects. Eating just a piece and wait for 24 hours is how I usually go.
I read advice once that if you were lost in the woods and didn’t know what might be poisonous, rub it on your arm and wait. If no reaction after 15 minutes, rub it on the inside of your lips lightly. If no reaction after 15 minutes, eat a very small amount, and if no reaction within a number of hours, you’re good to go.
No idea if this is accurate but it seems reasonable.
If you're lost in the woods, it's a bad idea to eat wild mushrooms. They're mostly water, and the small amount of calories they might provide are unlikely to be worth the risk, no matter how confident you are in identification. I'd go as far as to say that any foraging of wild food is a dangerous distraction from your more important task of escape.
Bad idea for mushrooms. Some of them are insidious - you could feel fine for several hours while your liver is destroyed, and by the time you feel sick it's too late to do anything.
No it isn't, at least not for mushrooms. To be safe, you need to use a reliable mushroom guide and identify anything you pick down to the species. It's best to learn how to identify a few species that you like and to stick to them.
Like others mentioned, I wouldn’t try it with mushrooms as they aren’t that nutritionally dense relative to the risks. But for plants, I’d do it as soon as I felt the need to eat something. See Into the Wild for an example of a guy whose life it could’ve saved.
Jeez, trusting an image recogition app for identifying mushrooms is nearly Darwin Award level of stupidity. In my "corner of the woods" the wise elders say to not even go mushroom foraging in regions that are a just a couple hundred kilometers away, because the mushrooms look slightly different there (at least when it comes to the mushrooms that are called 'Champignons' in German (lat. Agaricus)).
Hahahahahaha. Imagine using something from the App Store to identify mushrooms instead of a reference book that is specifically written to keep you alive.
I would say there is a case for warning labels in identification apps. especially when mushrooms are identified.
The apps themselves are really good. If you haven't used some popular ones I would say you're being too dismissive. But those apps were never for finding something to eat, and especially not for finding mushrooms to eat.
I can see how this isn't as Darwinian as I would otherwise lean toward.
Would you please stop the unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? We had to ask you about this just recently and you've continued to do it. That's not cool. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please fix this, we'd appreciate it.
Not to be that guy but it's a little annoying that this has been used and safe for years in Europe but the FDA wants to gather more data but was perfectly okay supporting mandates for the covid vaccine that hadn't received near the amount of testing.
I think they can give you a first idea of what you should be searching for, if you find a specimen you have no name for. From there on you'll have to figure out what is similar, edible, and grows in your area; and in particular, how the edible ones are different from inedible/poisonous ones. It is usually just a few.
I can't fathom eating some wild fungi without doing this kind of due diligence, blindly trusting an app.
"machine learning could be used to visually identify fungi"
Even if the recognition rate would be way better - NOPE.
There are mushrooms that look really identical - but one is deadly poisenous and the other good to eat.
Some mushrooms you can only identify by slicing them up, smelling, watch color change, look for certain small details under the top - and where they grow.
With current state of ML, you can get only a very rough classification and I doubt that changes anytime soon.
Portable DNA sequencing sounds better, but I am sceptical, if the tech is mature enough. (If it is, sign me up, but it sounds expensive, they do not even have a price tag)
No respectable micologist would attempt identifying a mushroom based on a picture alone. It's just not possible: there isn't a 1:1 correspondence between species and (macroscopic) appearance, not for every species or even the majority of them.
To be relatively sure on an identification you can combine a good knowledge of the location where the mushroom was found, smell and even taste, but a microscopy (observation of the size, shape and color of the spores, characteristics of the sporophore, hymenium, etc.) is necessary to be certain. In fact, the taxonomy was entirely based on it before genetic analysis started to take over.
You could probably do machine learning and reach a good accuracy based on microscopy, but certainly not with a blurry picture taken from a smartphone.
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.
...
They immediately began preparing an application to the FDA for the emergency use of an investigational antidote – that if administered within 72 hours of ingestion can prevent liver damage and death in almost every patient who receives it.
The drug, called Silibinin, is derived from the milk thistle plant and given intravenously. It has been available in Europe for over 30 years, but here in the United States it has yet to be approved by the FDA, so it is not stocked in hospitals or pharmacies.
The result is that in order to obtain it for patients, an emergency use application must be submitted to the FDA for every patient who needs it, after which it is flown in by courier directly from the FDA laboratory in Philadelphia.
“This literally takes an army of people working after hours,” said Gholam. “There are tireless, really unsung heroes at the UH research office who make this happen for every patient – they have to do this over and over and over.” Forty-seven times in the last 10 years to be exact.
The biggest enemy in this process, says Gholam, is time. If the drug is administered after the 72-hour window closes, the chances of a full recovery drop dramatically.
Making licensed physicians jump through these hoops while risking their patients lives should be a criminal offense. Yes, it's great that this particular patient survived, but there needs to be a better cost benefit analysis for drug approval. Almost certainly, there are patients who have suffered permanent damage or death because of the difficulty of obtaining this drug. What benefit is there to making this drug so hard to get? How many people miss the time window because of these requirements? How safe does a drug need to be if result of not getting it is a 40% chance of death or a liver transplant?