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The World's Deadliest Thing
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoThat was a fascinating story! "I'm looking you, Paltrow." was a chuckle.
- DoItToMe81 5y agoThis is one of the worst colour schemes I've seen in waking memory. I can't read it.
- enlyth 5y agodocument.querySelectorAll('.section-background').forEach(x => x.style.backgroundColor = 'black')
- gnulinux 5y agoJust click reader mode in Firefox.
- enlyth 5y agoI'm not going to install a different browser to read one article
- jraph 5y agoInstall it to read everything then :-]
- bambax 5y agoIt's available for Chrome also.
- funnyflamigo 5y agooutline.com is good too https://outline.com/U6wfgV https://outline.com/U6wfgV Protip: They also bypass certain paywalls
- SixDouble5321 5y agoLol, people were just assuming you were using the correct browser for this day and age. Don't be so obtuse.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
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- zamfi 5y agotl;dr: botulinum toxin. From TFA: It is perhaps strange that such a rare poisoning event shapes our modern food system so profoundly, but this is perhaps because the toxin produced is one of, if not the, deadliest on earth. It has been estimated that in its pure crystalline form, six grams of botulism toxin, about one teaspoon full, would be enough to kill 200 million people. The lethal dose when consumed orally is around 30 billionths of a gram, which if you want a relatable comparison, is about the same as if you cut a single poppy seed into ten thousand equal pieces and ate one of them. It is an amount so tiny, it really doesn’t make sense.
- paxys 5y agoThat contrast makes the page unreadable for me.
- kcplate 5y agoReader view used to irritate me but I have gown to appreciate it for just this reason
- dredmorbius 5y agoYou can modify the appearance of Reader View on Firefox using a userContent.css file. I've modified fonts, margins, and a few other bits. Unfortunately, borken semantic page struture still persists, but the net result is an improvement in many cases.
- sdflhasjd 5y agoIs there a theory for what purpose the Botulinum Toxin evolved for? I don't see that paralyzing your host is particularly useful for a bacterium.
- gostsamo 5y agoThe bacteria thrives in rotting meat, so killing the host might be exactly what it needs. It produces lots of spores present everywhere, so transmission from host to host is not an issue. Edit: what's -> lots
- Nextgrid 5y agoCan it be randomness? Unless paralyzing/killing the host is actively harmful, it might evolve by chance and remain as-is.
- swagasaurus-rex 5y agoBeing an anaerobic bacteria and one that can lie dormant for long periods of time, I don't think it needs the host to be alive.
- Borrible 5y agoIt comes in handy for organisms that happen to like feasting on decaying bodies through saprophytic nutrition. Paralysis enhances the chance of dying. Being anaerobic limits their expansion. Thanks to the Great Oxidation Event, cyanobacteria caused. By the way, often humans and other multicellular Organisms are just battleground or collateral damage in billion year old wars between bacteria and/or viruses.
- sacred_numbers 5y agoClostridium botulinum is anaerobic, and live in soil, so living humans are not a particularly good host. Dead humans could be, though, so natural selection would favor strains that efficiently returned themselves and their descendants back to the soil.
- croes 5y agoEvolution doesn't need purpose. As long as a feature doesn't reduce the survival rate, it remains in place. The toxicity could just be a side effect of the spores durability and longevity.
- asguy 5y agoOnly two mentions of 'nitrites'? Botulism is the reason we started curing meats with nitrite and nitrate in the first place. Canning is fine, but being able to keep meat at room temperature by just adding common (e.g. available in urine, and celery) chemicals is far more interesting.
- chadcmulligan 5y agoso does ham cured with celery also contain nitrites? I've been buying free range ham cured with celery because I thought it was free of nitrites.
- chongli 5y agoCelery extract contains a lot of nitrates and can be treated to produce nitrites as well [1]. The reason they use celery is to exploit a loophole in food labelling laws and avoid usage of the word nitrates due to their association with health risks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery_powder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery_powder
- d136o 5y agoI just listened to a podcast episode about this, basically celery cured just means “naturally found” nitrites… which are the same thing as artificial nitrites… they’re just nitrites. (Disclaimer: not a chemist) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stuff-you-should-know/id278981407?i=1000542081691 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stuff-you-should-know/...
- chadcmulligan 5y agoWell thats disappointing
- namdnay 5y agosome dired hams don't contain any nitrites. I know parma ham doesn't, for example
- TeeMassive 5y agoPro-tip to save your eyes: activate reader mode in Firefox by pressing F9
- jwilk 5y agoI think it's F9 only on Windows; it's Ctrl+Alt+R elsewhere.
- shmerl 5y agoInterested article, but what's with the overly intense site color scheme? It's hard to read becasue of it.
- pomian 5y agovery nicely written history of the toxin, the drug botox, and the principles of canning. related see the article on HN regarding Campbell's soups.
- bambax 5y ago> a disease that had been coined Botulism, after bolutus, the Latin for sausage [typo] If the author is reading, sausage in Latin is botellus, or sometimes botulus, but not bolutus.
- dredmorbius 5y agoFrom the Online Etymological Dictionary: "poisoning caused by eating imperfectly preserved food," 1878, from German Botulismus (1878), coined in German from Medieval Latin botulus "sausage" (see bowel) + -ismus suffix of action or state (see -ism). The sickness first was traced to eating tainted sausage (sausage poisoning was an old name for it). https://www.etymonline.com/word/botulism https://www.etymonline.com/word/botulism
- sho 5y ago> The lethal dose when consumed orally is around 30 billionths of a gram, which if you want a relatable comparison, is about the same as if you cut a single poppy seed into ten thousand equal pieces and ate one of them. It is an amount so tiny, it really doesn’t make sense. That's right - it makes no sense. How could such a small amount of anything do enough damage to shut down your entire body? According to wikipedia, it works by "cleaving key proteins required for nerve activation". Unless there's some self-replication mechanism, how does that even work? edit: I went and did the math. At an LD of 30 nanograms, that's about 1.2 billion actual molecules of this stuff to die. I guess that's enough to shut down a sufficient number of nerves that you just can't function anymore. The math: lethal dose / per molecule weight (molar mass / avogadro) (3.0e-10) / (149323.05 / 6.0221409e+23) = 1209888406.377984
- tgv 5y agoThe thing that surprises me is: how does it get distributed widely enough? I would imagine that 30pg would lump together somewhere and damage a handful of neurons, not that it would spread and reach all essential parts of the nerve system.
- sbierwagen 5y agoExtracellular fluid is actively transported-- after all, it's where all gas exchange happens, and if you get a hypoxic spot in your body then those cells are going to die. The wikipedia article claims, without citation: "The extracellular fluid is constantly "stirred" by the circulatory system, which ensures that the watery environment which bathes the body's cells is virtually identical throughout the body. This means that nutrients can be secreted into the ECF in one place (e.g. the gut, liver, or fat cells) and will, within about a minute, be evenly distributed throughout the body."
- tasty_freeze 5y agoWikipedia says "The estimated human lethal dose of type A toxin is 1.3–2.1 ng/kg intravenously or intramuscularly, 10–13 ng/kg when inhaled, or 1000 ng/kg when taken by mouth." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin
- cgio 5y agoThe rapid, long-lasting and highly noticeable cosmetic effects made Botox a near instant success. In small doses, the same nerve damage that causes fatal paralysis in poisoning cases, helps to remove forehead creases and crow’s feet, with the only side effects being an inability to express emotion using your face, … ironic that many celebrities who publicly advocated a clean living, chemical-free lifestyle, were also early adopters of a treatment that involves injecting the deadliest substance on earth into your face (looking at you, Paltrow). If any of them were surprised at this seeming paradox, they certainly didn’t show it. Loved the subtle irony here.
- jandrese 5y agoTechnically Botox is all natural. It's even vegan.
- forty 5y agoIs it? It feels like it exploit the hard work of those poor bacterias ;)
- go_elmo 5y agoonly eukaryotic species are defined as "animal" afaik, so this is another league. Not getting pregnant every month is also not considered abortion in regions where this is banned, right?
- forty 5y agoIn French, the translation for vegan sounds something like "vegetalist". I agree bacteria are not animals, but they are not vegetal either. But I guess this would exclude muchrooms too :D
- ceejayoz 5y agoSee also: apple seed extract (cyanide), ricin...
- flipbrad 5y agoSurprised the article doesn't mention honey, which if you're a new parent, is an important thing to know about, on this topic. To quote the US CDC: "Honey can contain the bacteria that causes infant botulism, so do not feed honey to children younger than 12 months. Honey is safe for people 1 year of age and older." Despite this being reasonably well-known, usually, you still get idiocy like this: https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-information/honey-pacifiers-suspected-texas-infant-botulism-cases https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...
- awild 5y agoOn top of that, people should remember that while honey is naturally microbially stable. It is not actively anti microbial. Mixing it into your dish will not make it more shelf stable. The stability is simply because it's too dry for microbial activity. I'm mentioning this because it's a common misconception in fermentation communities.
- chronogram 5y agoYou’d imagine the fermentation communities have heard of mead!
- bambax 5y ago> In this way, Clostridium Botulinum shapes our modern food system. It is why (...) jarred sauces can sometimes have a harsh acidic note, particularly creamy sauces that are not naturally acidic. Yes, I have noticed this many times. Tomato sauce is naturally acidic, but ready-made, bottled tomato sauce is much more acidic than what you can make from scratch. Acidity can be fought by adding just a little baking soda.
- awild 5y agoI've once gotten the advice of boiling it for at least fifteen minutes since the citric acid commonly used will break down at normal cooking temperatures. Wikipedia lists its breakdown temperature at 175C so it's plausible but I don't know the temperatures at which tomato sauce boils. Baking soda is fine too, but it can bring its own minerally flavor into your foods. So I'd use it sparingly.
- bambax 5y agoTomato sauce being mostly water it probably boils at around 100°C? I don't think you can have tomato sauce reach 175°C in a normal kitchen (the inside of a pressure cooker is about 120°C). In a deep fryer the oil goes to much higher temps but you can't keep anything watery inside (that's one of the points of deep frying: to remove water). Or is it 175°F, which would be ~80°C? In my experience just boiling a sauce doesn't reduce its acidity much; letting it simmer for hours can work wonders but it's a whole different approach. Yes baking soda is very effective at small doses so just a pinch in a big pan of sauce is usually enough.
- loeg 5y agoIf boiling for a few minutes broke down the acid, wouldn’t it be pretty ineffective for use in canning? They boil it during canning.
- Stratoscope 5y agoPop quiz! Do you ever buy frozen vacuum-sealed fish? The kind where each piece is sealed in its own plastic pouch? It is convenient and delicious. To me it can taste fresher than some "fresh" fish. One reason is that the sealed pouch keeps oxygen out. Have you wondered why it says "remove all packaging before defrosting"? And ignored that advice like I did for many years? After all, the fish seems to defrost just fine in its original vacuum-sealed packaging, whether you defrost it in the refrigerator or in a cold water bath. And it is so convenient to leave it in the pouch while defrosting. Well, there is a reason to take those instructions seriously. The vacuum-sealed package is an anerobic environment, just right for botulinum and listeria. So unwrap the fish, let it have that little kiss of oxygen, and then rewrap it for defrosting. https://www.google.com/search?q=remove+frozen+fish+from+packaging https://www.google.com/search?q=remove+frozen+fish+from+pack...
- Chris2048 5y ago> just right for botulinum and listeria But if it was frozen, wouldn't that kill off any bacteria? Then, as a sealed environment, there wouldn't be anything to grow, even if the environment is just right. edit: ignore this comment, I just read how the spores are resistant to boiling/freezing...
- phonypc 5y agoFreezing doesn't kill bacteria. Reliably, anyway.
- antognini 5y agoI have wondered about this, but even if botulinum or listeria are present, won't they grow very slowly in the refrigerator? I would think that defrosting for 12 hours or so at refrigerator temperatures would still be fairly safe. Or is the quantity that can be dangerous so minute that it doesn't matter?
- Uehreka 5y agoPerhaps its one of those things where “95% of the time you’ll be fine, but be careful if you do it 20 times, because botulism only needs to happen once.”
- default-kramer 5y ago> Karl Friedrich Meyer [...] is a largely unheralded hero of global public health. Many consider him the twentieth century’s Pasteur, and his work doubtless saved millions of lives. Unheralded indeed. His Wikipedia entry isn't very well-sourced, but assuming it's mostly accurate this guy could be a great subject for a motivated long-form journalist willing to do a bit of research. At the very least I'd want to read it.
- newsbinator 5y agoI'd want to read about his path to discovery and challenges while changing the status quo for sure. I wouldn't want to read about his grandfather's antique clock or his childhood pets. Long-form journalism in 2021 isn't for me.
- causi 5y agoThe entire global face paralysing industry is supported by an annual production of just a few milligrams. A writeup of the production methods would be interesting. I wonder if it is produced in highly concentrated or even pure form and then diluted, or produced in diluted form. The former may be more efficient but I suspect it would be difficult to control tiny volumes of toxin that just happen to get lost in the mixing process. If you're diluting red paint into white paint it may not matter if a microgram of pure red hides in a crevice and get deposited into a gallon sometime later but it would sure matter if it was botulinum toxin.
- Tomte 5y agoA few hints: "A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year. That little bit is derived from a larger primary source, which is locked down somewhere in the continental U.S.—no one who isn’t on a carefully guarded list of government and company officials knows exactly where. Occasionally (the company won’t say how frequently), some of the toxin (the company won’t say how much) is shipped in secrecy to the lab in Irvine for research. Even less frequently, a bit of the toxin is transported by private jet, with guards aboard, to the plant in Ireland." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-26/inside-fort-botox-where-a-deadly-toxin-yields-2-8-billion-drug https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-26/inside-fo...
- YeBanKo 5y agoAfter reading this article and some googling I am still confused if salt is as efficient against it as vinegar?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kavalg 5y agoHmm, I guess then it is not safe to store walnuts in a vacuum package if they are not dry enough. Initially I thought it only affected meat/fish.
- DeathArrow 5y ago>it is likely that the pure crystalline form of Botulinum toxin is now also the most valuable, with an estimated street value of $100 trillion per kilogram So next time when you forget some cooked food out of the fridge and are disposing it, you can think how you are literally throwing a fortune away.
- ermir 5y agoBotulism is why you cannot make and keep garlic oil, every time you want to use it you must make a fresh batch.
- swiftcoder 5y agoThis is the main danger of homemade mayonnaise as well - it’s not the raw egg that gets you. If you don’t add sufficient acid to the mayo, then your potato salad ends up in a perfect oxygen-free environment for botulism…
- nfin 5y agohow do you know that garlic+oil could produce botulism? I think I haven’t understood what kind of food + low oxygen/low acid + room temperature might create botulism… could you help me understand? I derived that most of those things are animal related, but garlic+oil is not. Thanks!!
- ermir 5y agoThe botulism spores are abundant in soil, but they don't get activated unless the conditions are met. The main condition is an environment without oxygen and the presence of proteins, which happen both in sealed oil-garlic containers.
- sdfghderwg 5y agoI guess I'm having the same struggle as nfin. > The main condition is an environment without oxygen and the presence of proteins, which happen both in sealed oil-garlic containers. This seems such a general condition... in first approximation, sealed containers with anything at home are sealed containers with proteins...
- ermir 5y agoMost factory-made food has preservatives and other stuff that stabilize the food and prevent botulism. In particular many foods use vinegar to increase acidity and make it impossible for botulism to bloom.
- dynamite-ready 5y agoThat was awesome to read.
- wink 5y ago> An alternative approach is to acidify the contents to a pH below 4.5 (although the effective upper limit is 4.2-4.3 in most production, just to be sure), and then apply heat up to about 91C to kill any bacteria, in a processed known as Pasteurisation. Although the spores remain intact at this temperature, the __low acidity__ means that they will not grow into bacteria or produce their deadly toxin This paragraph highly confuses me. Shouldn't that be "high acidity, as in low pH"?
- ohmahjong 5y agoIt might mean that it is acidic, but not strongly acidic? "Lightly acidic", maybe? A pH of 4.5 is less acidic than soda water.
- wink 5y ago"low as in not neutral" and not "low as in not a lot", yeah maybe, thanks.
- loeg 5y ago> Shouldn't that be "high acidity, as in low pH"? Yes. Maybe sibling comment is right that the author was trying to suggest 4.5 isn’t especially acidic, but it is somewhat confusing to read.
- sva_ 5y ago> To combat botulism in canned foods, it is necessary for all parts of the sealed can to reach an internal temperature of 121C, as this is sufficient to destroy botulinum spores, leaving the contents of the can free from the potential for bacterial growth*. [...] > In this way, Clostridium Botulinum shapes our modern food system. It is why canned foods have a burnt, metallic taste [...] This seems to suggest that canned foods are heated inside of the can. But cans are usually lined with BPA or similar chemicals on the inside. Wouldn't those melt at such temperatures?
- ben_w 5y agoWikipedia says BPA has a melting point of 158-159 C, though I don’t anything (not even the name) about whatever chemical will replace BPA now BPA is regarded as an endocrine disruptor.
- amai 5y agoAre vaccines or antibiotics available against Clostridium Botulinum? Would it help e.g. to vaccinate lifestock?
- lr4444lr 5y agoGreat article. Do we have any idea how or why this microbe evolved to be so lethal, widespread, and tough? How old it is?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- belter 5y agoJust updated my SQLite table of "Things_Wont_Work_With.txt" ..."It has been estimated that in its pure crystalline form, six grams of botulism toxin, about one teaspoon full, would be enough to kill 200 million people. The lethal dose when consumed orally is around 30 billionths of a gram..."
- rzwitserloot 5y ago> If any of them were surprised at this seeming paradox, they certainly didn’t show it. I wonder how long the author chuckled at this turn of phrase.
- cs702 5y agoWhat a fantastic find of an article! It's not every day that I get to read about a microbe so deadly that a small jar would be enough to kill all of humanity, so difficult to weaponize that no nation or group has ever been able to build weapons with it, so important to our modern food system that it has altered the taste of almost every packaged food we eat, and so widely used for cosmetic facial procedures that everyone everywhere knows its commercial name (Botox). The title doesn't do justice to the article.
- ddek 5y ago> Doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo made a few attempts to deploy it at US military bases in the 1980s, but were so shambolically unsuccessful that their attacks went unnoticed by authorities. Is a wonderful sentence.
- brutusborn 5y agoMy favourite is the last line of this passage: > It is of course deeply ironic that many celebrities who publicly advocated a clean living, chemical-free lifestyle, were also early adopters of a treatment that involves injecting the deadliest substance on earth into your face (looking at you, Paltrow). If any of them were surprised at this seeming paradox, they certainly didn’t show it.
- stavros 5y agoI love him for that sentence.
- Chris2048 5y agoIt'd be interesting to know why it's so difficult to weaponize. Is the caveat that the toxin is only so deadly once in the bloodstream, but is otherwise hard to get there?
- guerrilla 5y agoThis was a surprisingly fun read with some really funny points... > with the only side effects being an inability to express emotion using your face > The entire global face paralysing industry
- soneca 5y agoI laughed at this one: ” If any of them were surprised at this seeming paradox, they certainly didn’t show it.”
- margofx 5y agoThere's a lot of things at stake, especially if you're dealing with foods that are processed. Some might even last than our lifespan.
- giantg2 5y agoOne thing not mentioned is cooking destroys the bacteria and it's toxin. I forget the exact times for temperatures, but it's something like 212F for 5 minutes or 180F for 10 minutes. Also, why is infant botulism an issue with honey but not other other things? The spores are everywhere and cooking does not kill the spores.
- loeg 5y ago> One thing not mentioned is cooking destroys the bacteria and it's toxin. I forget the exact times for temperatures, but it's something like 212F for 5 minutes or 180F for 10 minutes. The article mentions this explicitly: > To combat botulism in canned foods, it is necessary for all parts of the sealed can to reach an internal temperature of 121C, as this is sufficient to destroy botulinum spores … > An alternative approach is to acidify the contents to a pH below 4.5 (although the effective upper limit is 4.2-4.3 in most production, just to be sure), and then apply heat up to about 91C to kill any bacteria… Although the spores remain intact at this temperature, the low acidity means that they will not grow into bacteria or produce their deadly toxin. The latter approach is what is commonly used in “water bath” home canning. The former is also doable at home, but you need a pressure canner to get the water well above boiling.
- giantg2 5y agoThat's the pasteurization part. What I'm saying, is that if you had a jar of food that wasn't processed correctly but looked fine (botulism doesn't typically change the appearance), subsequently cooking it will destroy the bacteria and toxin. There's no mention in the article of the toxin being heat sensitive. So if you can some spaghetti sauce and simmer it for 10 minutes before adding to the pasta, then you should have no risk of botulism. Think of it as defense in depth - a second safeguard against botulism.
- loeg 5y agoCDC says 85C internal temperature for 5 minutes, but better to just throw it out - botulism isn’t the only thing that will grow in food that hasn’t been prepared or stored safely. https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/Botulism/clinicians/control.asp#decontamination https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/Botulism/clinicians/control....
- yboris 5y agoRelated: America’s Food Safety System Failed to Stop a Salmonella Epidemic. It’s Still Making People Sick https://www.propublica.org/article/salmonella-chicken-usda-food-safety https://www.propublica.org/article/salmonella-chicken-usda-f...
- PebblesRox 5y ago"The only case linked to a commercially produced food product in that time was non-fatal, involving a man who ate some hummus that had been left out of the fridge for several weeks and smelt so bad that other members of his family refused to go near it." Reminds me of a conversation between my brothers after some food fell on the floor: "You're going to eat that?" "Yeah, I have an immune system." "So do I -- and mine includes the part of me that goes 'Ewww, don't stick that in your mouth.'"
- mrlonglong 5y agoI have a tin of sardines that's been kept in the fridge for quite a while (2 months I think) Is it now unsafe?