Wicked Plants (6 page)

As early as 1735, when corn was imported from the New World, impoverished people in Spain and other European countries showed symptoms of pellagra. Those symptoms came to be known as the four D’s: dermatitis, dementia, diarrhea, and death. In fact, a pair of researchers writing for a British medical journal suggested that the ghastly symptoms of pellagra could have inspired European myths of vampirism in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula:
pale skin that erupted in blisters when exposed to the sun, sleepless nights brought on by dementia, an inability to eat normal food because of digestive problems, and a morbid appearance just before death.

During the first half of the twentieth century, pellagra sickened three million Americans and killed one hundred thousand. The disease was not entirely understood until the 1930s. Today corn is considered to be a perfectly safe and healthy part of the diet as long as it is eaten in combination with other foods.

The leaves of this Asian plant contain high levels of oxalic acid, which can cause weakness, difficulty breathing, gastrointestinal problems, and even coma and death in rare circumstances. In 1917 the
Times
of London reported on the death of a minister who died after eating a dish made from rhubarb leaves. The unfortunate cook admitted that she had used a recipe that she found in the newspaper titled “War Time Tip from the National Training Schools of Cookery.” In fact, there was a war on, and food was scarce, but recipes like this one added yet another threat to both soldiers and civilians.

This fruit, popular in jams, cakes, and pies, is much more dangerous when consumed raw. In 1983 a group of people attending a retreat in central California had to be flown by helicopter to a hospital after drinking fresh elderberry juice. Most parts of the plant, including the uncooked fruit, may contain varying levels of cyanide. Generally, people experience severe nausea and recover.

There’s a reason why grocery stores don’t sell raw cashew nuts. Cashews are part of the same botanical family as poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac. The cashew tree produces the same irritating oil, urushiol. The nut itself is perfectly safe to consume, but if it comes into contact with any part of the shell during harvest, it will give the person who eats it a nasty rash. For that reason, cashews are steamed open, making them partially cooked even if they appear to be raw. In 1982 a Little League team in Pennsylvania sold bags of cashew nuts that were imported from Mozambique. Half of the people who ate them developed rashes on their arms, groin, armpits, or buttocks because some of the bags of nuts contained pieces of cashew shells, which would have had the same effect as mixing poison ivy leaves with the nuts.

Perfectly safe and healthy, except if eaten raw or undercooked. The harmful compound in kidney beans is called phytohaemagglutinin, and it can bring on severe nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. People usually recover quickly, but it takes only four or five raw beans to bring on these extreme symptoms. The incomplete cooking of raw beans in a slow cooker is a common source of red kidney bean poisoning.

This member of the dreaded nightshade family contains a poison called solanine, which can bring on burning and gastrointestinal symptoms and even coma and death in rare cases. Cooking a potato will kill most of the solanine in it, but if a potato has been exposed to the light long enough for its skin to turn green, that may be a sign of increased levels of solanine.

The ackee fruit plays an essential role in Jamaican cuisine. Only the aril (the flesh surrounding the seeds) is safe to eat, and the fruit must be harvested at a precise point of ripeness or it may be toxic. Ackee poisoning, or Jamaican vomiting sickness, can be fatal if untreated.

An important food crop in Latin America, Asia, and parts of Africa, the root is cooked in much the same way that potatoes are. A starchy flour derived from the root is used to make tapioca pudding and bread. There’s just one problem: cassava contains a substance called linamarin that converts to cyanide in the body. The cyanide can be eliminated through careful preparation that involves soaking, drying, or baking the root, but this process is imperfect and can take several days. In times of drought, cassava roots may produce higher levels of the toxin, and people in famine-stricken areas may eat more of the root and take less care with preparation.

Cassava poisoning can be deadly. Even at lower levels it can cause a chronic condition known in Africa as konzo. Symptoms include weakness, tremors, a lack of coordination, vision problems, and partial paralysis.

CLAVICEPS PURPURA

Historians still wonder what caused the bizarre behavior that led eight young girls to be suspected of demonic possession and witchcraft during the winter of 1691 in Salem, Massachusetts. One girl after another went into convulsions, babbled incoherently, and complained of creepy skin sensations. Doctors could find nothing wrong with them, and the best explanation medical science had to offer was that a witch cast a spell over the girls.

Almost three hundred years later, a researcher had another idea. Ergot, the toxic fungus that infects rye and contaminates bread, could explain the girls’ bizarre behavior.

Ergot is a parasitic fungus that attaches itself to a flowering cereal grass like rye or wheat. It flourishes in damp conditions and possesses the special trick of being able to mimic the very grain it has infected. It forms a hardened mass called a sclerotium on its host and can nurture dormant spores until the conditions are just right to release them. Millions of ergot spores can be harvested right along with a rye or wheat crop, and the
bread produced from those grains can contain enough of the fungus to infect whoever eats it—including some young girls living in Salem during a particularly damp winter.

The alkaloids in ergot constrict blood vessels, causing seizures, nausea, uterine contractions, and eventually gangrene and death. Long before Albert Hofmann extracted lysergic acid from ergot to make LSD, people infected with ergotism had bad LSD-like trips of their own. Hysteria, hallucinations, and a feeling that something is crawling on the skin are all signs of ergot poisoning.

Records going back to the Middle Ages show that from time to time, an entire village would succumb to mysterious illness. Villagers would dance in the streets, go into convulsions, and eventually collapse. This “dancing mania” was also sometimes called St. Anthony’s fire, a possible reference to the awful burning sensations victims felt, and the eventual gangrenous blisters and peeling skin. The disease is believed to have killed over fifty thousand people during that time. Even livestock were not safe: when cows were fed the infected grains, they lost their hooves, tails, and even their ears before they died.

The relationship between these strange behaviors and ergot infestation had only just been discovered in Europe when the Salem witch trials began, but it is unlikely that news of this breakthrough would have reached the colonies. Eventually nineteen people went to the gallows for the crime of casting spells on the girls. They protested their innocence all the way.

If only someone had thought to question the town baker. Judging from weather records, crop reports, the girls’ symptoms, and the fact that the hysteria stopped almost as abruptly as it started, it is entirely possible that the whole event was caused by an outbreak of ergot brought on by an unusually wet winter.

Outbreaks of ergotism are rare today, but a few did occur in the twentieth century. There are still no ergot-resistant strains of ryegrass, but rye farmers now rinse their crop in a salt solution to kill the fungus.

Meet the Relatives
There are over fifty ergot species, each favoring a particular kind of grass or cereal crop.

In 2001, a group of medical researchers reopened an ancient murder case. Claudius, emperor of Rome from 41 to 54 BC, died under mysterious circumstances after several months of bitter fighting with his fourth wife, Agrippina. A modern-day review of his symptoms pointed to poisoning by muscarine, a toxin found in several species of deadly mushrooms. But who fed him this final meal? One expert at the conference suggested that “Claudius died of
de una uxore nimia
, or one too many wives.”

Another infamous mushroom poisoning case took place in Paris in 1918. Henri Girard was an insurance broker who had some training as a chemist. That turned out to be a good combination for a serial killer: he took out insurance policies on his victims and then killed them using poisons that he obtained from drug wholesalers or mixed in his own laboratory. His poison of choice was a culture of typhoid bacteria, but for his last murder victim, Madame Monin, he prepared a little dish of poisonous mushrooms. She left his house and collapsed on the
sidewalk. The authorities eventually caught up with him, but he died before he could go to trial.

Although mushrooms are not truly plants—they’re fungi—they deserve some mention for the number of deaths they cause. In 1909, the
London Globe
reported that as many as ten thousand people in Europe died of mushroom poisoning every year. There are few reliable sources today of the number of deaths by mushrooms worldwide, but in the United States, poison control centers get over seven thousand calls a year. In 2005, they reported six deaths from mushroom poisoning. Sporadic outbreaks can kill many more. For example, in 1996, mushrooms killed over a hundred people in Ukraine thanks to an unusually abundant crop in the forest.

Some species contain more toxins than others, but the most dangerous varieties go to work on the liver or kidneys, causing irreversible damage or death.