Radioactive Hogs on the Loose in Germany?!?!?
August 4th, 2010
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This story has recently been making the rounds in various news outlets.
Radioactive Boars Rampaging Through Germany
It sounds like the plot of a B-movie, yet it’s bizarrely true: Radioactive boars are on the loose and thriving in Germany’s forests.A succession of mild winters has left Germany scrambling to deal with a skyrocketing wild boar population. Tales of swarming beasts rampaging through city streets and attacking citizens occur with alarming regularity.
The problem has been aggravated by the lingering effects of the Chernobyl disaster from twenty-five years ago; a large portion of the wild animals are contaminated by radioactivity.
Poisonous radiation leaves the beasts completely inedible (wild boar is considered a delicacy in Germany), and the phenomenon is becoming expensive for the German government. In the last hunting season, 650,000 boar were shot versus 287,000 in the previous year. And due to atomic energy regulations, the government must buy contaminated animals from hunters who catch them.
Berlin compensated hunters to the tune of over $500,000 in 2009, writes German newspaper Der Spiegel — quadruple the payment in 2007.
Though the Chernobyl explosion happened a quarter century ago, high levels of radiation remain in the region’s vegetation. And wild boars are especially susceptible because of their proclivity for mushrooms and truffles, which are especially efficient at absorbing radiation.
Sounds scary, doesn’t it?
It should be noted that despite the descriptions and headlines of boar “rampaging” or “storming” Germany, the hogs themselves are no more prone to rampaging or storming towns and cities than the non-radioactive variety (or rather less radioactive, since all animals are radioactive). They generally live in sparsely settled areas and, although the population of boar in central Europe has risen in recent years, they’re not tearing through homes and eating people alive or anything like that. Boar can certainly be aggressive, nasty animals and their increase in population has lead to some concern over their damage to property or danger to people, but that is not a new concern and is not related to radioactivity.
There is no rampage.
The primary isotope that seems to be o concern is Cesium-137. With a half-life of 30.7 years, close to half the Cs-137 from the Chernobyl accident has already decayed away and it will continue to decrease, both due to radioactive decay and the continued dilution in the environment. As time goes on, sedimentation and erosion will tend to cover or wash away much of the Cs-137 from the area and make it less available to life forms.
Still, if the levels are high enough, it could be dangerous. Cs-137 is similar chemically to potassium and has a fairly high biological uptake in both plants and animals. It emits strong beta and gamma radiation and is produced as a fission byproduct. Today Cs-137 is the single largest contributor to gamma radiation left over from the Chernobyl accident, as most other fission byproducts have long decayed away.
How radioactive the Boars in question actually are:
The current standard for radioactivity in boar meet limits levels to 600 becquerel per kilogram of cesium-137. There have been reports of levels as high as 7,000 becquerel per kilogram in a few animals, but most animals are likely closer to the 600 becquerel limit.
600 becquerel is equivalent to 0.016 microcuries and the highest reported readings of about 7000 becquerel per kilogram is equivalent to about .19 microcuries per kilogram. If a person were to eat five kilograms of meat from boar with the highest concentration of Cs-137, they would be exposed to just under one microcurie of Cs-137, and considerably if the meat were from an animal with less extreme levels.
This is hardly a huge amount of radioactivity. The image to the right shows a calibration source containing 1.0 microcuries of cesium-137. These tiny sources can be purchased (with a limit of up to ten sources per order) with no license required. They cost under one hundred US dollars each.
Cesium-137 has a biological half-life of about 110 days in adult humans. It is shorter for children. This should not be confused with the nuclear half-life, as biological half-life is a measure of how long it is retained in the body, not how long it takes to decay. It has an absorption of about 73% from the consumption of contaminated meat.
Based on extensive experimental research the total radiation dose from consumption of Cs-137 in foods can be determined. DOE/EH-0071, “Internal dose conversion factors for calculation of dose to the public” provides a conversion factor for total dose from a given quantity of Cs-137 of 5.00E-05 mrem/pCi (or 0.00005 mrem/pCi). There are one million microcuries in a picocurie, so the formula can also be expressed as 50 mrem per mCi.
Therefore the dose rate for a person who consumes the meat of one of these boar can be determined:
- One kilogram of meat at just above the limit – .8 mrem
- Five kilograms of meat at just above the limit – 4 mrem
- Ten kilograms of meat at just above the limit – 8 mrem
- One kilogram of meat with the highest concentration recorded – 9.5 mrem
- Five kilograms of meat with the highest concentration recorded -47.5 mrem
- Ten kilograms of meat with the highest concentration recorded – 95 mrem
To put this in context, the average annual radiation exposure for a person living at sea level is about 360 mrem per year. A dental x-ray is about three mrem and a five hour flight can increase exposure by two to two and a half mrem.
Based on these exposure levels, it’s pretty clear that nobody is going to be getting acute radiation poisoning from eating boar, and in most cases, the levels are low enough to be on par with the kind of exposure a person gets from the round-trip on a trip abroad. Still, in the most extreme circumstances, where a person eats a very large amount of meat from an animal of the very highest concentrations recorded, the exposure may be high to be worth taking some precautions.
Whether or not screening of meat is really necessary could be subject to legitimate debate. The standards for levels of Cs-137 tend to be quite low – probably lower than they really need to be. While it’s possible that close to 100 mrem could result from eating enough meat, ten kilograms of boar meat would be enough to eat a full boar meat dinner every night for two weeks. That doesn’t seem terribly likely.
Standards vary by country, and in Germany are lower than many others. For example, in the United States, the maximum permissible levels of Cs-137 allowed in game hunted on contaminated DOE property, such as the Savannah River Site, varies depending on the size of the animal, and standards are generally based on estimated maximum dose to the consumer of the product, rather than total activity. The standards are generally based on requirement of no more than 99 mrem of exposure to the hunter (who is presumed to also be the consumer of the meat.)
Conclusion:
The Cs-137 levels of hogs found in certain parts of Germany is generally low enough to present little concern if the meat is concerned. In rare circumstances, levels may be high enough to warrant action, but they are not high enough to panic over. Even if someone ate several kilograms of meat of the highest concentration, the total dose received, though significant, is not going to be enough to make them ill or cause any reason for drastic concern over. It would be no worse than a series of CT-scan sessions, which many people receive each year.
Above all else, these hogs are in no way a radiological threat to those who come into close proximity with them. They’re not contaminating the countryside, and the image of “radioactive hogs on the loose” is more fit for a b-list movie than for news coverage. Still, it would be a good idea to keep away from any of these wild hogs, whether or not they have significant Cs-137 levels, because they tend to have a rather deminer and can be quite aggressive. Although, according to some, they also can be quite delicious!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Enviornment, Nuclear, Obfuscation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 4th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
As usual with anything to do with radiation, the press and the regulators go off the deep end. For bodies of water with known low-level metal or pesticide contamination, anglers are told to limit consumption to one or two meals a week. The lest amount of radioactivity above background, and game is unfit for human consumption.
But these hogs are something else, tenacious survivors, highly adaptable, and very intelligent and mean as they come when cornered. Hunters know they have one shot to drop one of these things when they charge, or they better have a tree to climb very quickly.
Boar hunting is very hard on dogs as well, with losses expected. It is not uncommon for a group of hunters to go out with fourteen dogs and only bring nine back.
As for the meat, the taste is very strong. I find only the sow’s flesh palatable. The real risk from eating this meat however is not from radioactivity, but from trichinosis, which is endemic in wild hog populations.
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August 4th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
The danger from trichinosis could best be eliminated by… all together now… irradiation.
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August 4th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Joffan said:
Oh good one, Joffan! Full points
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August 4th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
DV82XL said:
That seems like more reasonable policy to me. Chances are eating a couple meals a week of these animals is going to only cause, at worst, a milirem or so of exposure.
I’d really like to see the proportions of what the number are found with a given cs-137 concentration in them. I keep hearing that some have been found to have “7000 becquerel per kilogram” of cs-137, but I can’t find any solid numbers. Based on everything I have seen, I am pretty sure that levels of 5000+ becquerel are a once in a blue moon occurrence. Finding a hog with 7000 Bq/Kg of meat is probably like finding a seven foot tall man. Yes, there are seven foot tall men, they do exist, but there are not many of them and you don’t meet someone that tall very often.
If anyone has any good numbers on this I’d appreciate it. My impression, based on other similar cases is that most of the boar are probably going to be under 2000 Bq/Kg with only a tiny subset being significantly higher.
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August 5th, 2010 at 2:36 am
Hmmm, first one complaint! Can you start using proper SCi units please? Converting outdated non-sci units in my head while reading your post gives me exersise strain.
Second, FOX news? I think it is funny that Germans are complaining about Cs-137 in their game when I have not heard anything from Sweden about caesium contaminated meat for some time. STUK reports in 2007 that there is very little caesium in raindeer in Finland and that the 600 Bq/kg was reached in 1989 from a peak at 1100 Bq/kg in 1986, today the Finnish raindeer meat contains 100-200 Bq/kg. http://www.stuk.fi/sateilytietoa/sateily_ymparistossa/elintarvikkeet/cesium137/poro/sv_FI/poro/
(sorry, only in Swedish/Finnish, but the graph is good)
There are still areas in Sweden where mushrooms and Fish contain high levels of caesium some places still report levels above 1500 Bq/kg but not in large Game as far as I have managed to find, the information is a bit scattered.
The import limit to bring meat in to the EU is 600 Bq/kg, the limit for sale (in Sweden) is 1500 Bq/kg (not sure about the rest of the EU-federation). So the German position is a bit strange not to mention restrictive with a limit of 600 Bq/kg.
Sweden and Finland had a large portion of the fallout from the accident, the guys I talked to who found out about the accident (Forsmark power station I believe) did tell me it was basically raining reactor coolant in some places.
Germany has a very strong position against nuclear technology and I belive this is why this story crops up. I can’t find any information about this from the BMU, but then my german is not that good. It would be interesting to find some numbers of where and when the contaminated boars where found.
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August 5th, 2010 at 5:17 am
Mmmmmmm cesium 137
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August 5th, 2010 at 6:32 am
Good article from New Scientist on attitudes toward radiation in general
Who’s Afraid of Radiation
“Our attitude to ionising radiation is irrational, and easing safety limits would do far more good than harm”, says Wade Allison
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August 5th, 2010 at 10:54 am
DV82XL said:
That article should be mandatory reading for anyone voicing their opinion on the subject!
Great find! Thank you.
I have never been a great believer of the “no thresh hold, linear correlation” between dose and risk, read this article if you don’t agree with me:
“Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?” W.L. Chen et al, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 2004
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August 5th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Matte said:
**groan**
Every time I read something in Sieverts, I have to think to myself “okay, now how many millirem is that?” When I hear “Gray” I have to think “Okay how many RAD’s is that?” Sometimes I have trouble remembering the conversion off the top of my head. If someone tole me I had just been exposed to 10 sieverts, I would not at first know whether to brush that off or be concerned.
Nearly everyone I know in the radiation field speaks in REM, milliREM, RAD’s, Roentgen’s, Curies etc. Nearly every radioactive source I’ve ever seen has been labeled in curies. Nearly every instrument is in Roentgens. I can’t remember a time I’ve seen a test source that was not labeled in curies.
Maybe it’s because I’m American, and we like to hang on to old units.
However, this just angers me, because there was nothing wrong with the units. I can understand why there is an issue with the imperial system of measurement: 12 inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, 5,280 feet in a mile and there’s a difference between a statute mile and a nautical mile on top of all that.
It makes sense to consider a system with such varied and non-consistent divisions and units of measure to be less desirable to one which uses a single unit that is prefixed to indicate the magnitude by factors of ten. That’s perfectly reasonable.
However, what’s the damn issue with REM? REM conforms to metric prefixes! As does RAD’s and Roentegens. You can have millirem and microrem. Someone just up and decided to create a new unit that is equal to 10 millirem. Why the hell did they do that? There’s no reason to do that!
Not just that, but REM’s are so much easier because the important thresholds fall close to major divisions:
<100 rem - No acute illness
100-200 rem - illness, temporary and generally not fatal
200+ rem - serious or critical
1000+ rem - basically always fatal
And Becquerel, what the hell is even the deal with that? Why does it exist? Before that unit was created we had a different name for the same damn thing – “Decays per second”
Of course for any significantly sized amount of radioactive material, the becquerel does not cut it and needs to be prefixed with large prefixes like “tera,” “peta” or “exa” – which more people are not that familiar with anyway.
Now granted that the curie is a bit of a strange division at 3.7×10^10 decays per second, because it originally comes from approximately one gram of radium, but the unit works well and can be prefixed just like a Becquerel can.
Who the hell thought it was such a great idea to start these redundant and no-better units? Maybe someone just wanted to make the displays on all the existing equipment obsolete just to be an ass.
Matte said:
Fox news is just one source of this story. I used them because they were fairly concise with their article and also have fairly high readership. It’s not really a story isolated to Fox News though.
there are a number of stories listed here:
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=radioactive+boar
It’s been making the rounds in the major media outlets – not just Fox News.
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August 5th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
drbuzz0 said:
As someone that grew up with the Imperial and went through the agony of metrication, only to spend a career in an industry that used American units throughout, I can understand.
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August 5th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
1 Bq=1 decay per second
1 Sv=Q*Gy=1 Joule/kg absorbed energy Q=quality factor, correction depending on tissue.
Easy peasy, now get it right! Personally I never use Gy at work as it has no meaning to the stuff I do, can’t really imagine where it would be relevant but then I am not a health physics dork (they usually are!).
Dose rates are denoted Sv / “time unit”, and are usually used with some sort of prefix. I have been in a room with a normal dose rate of several Sv/h, however when I was in there the dose rate was just high, not lethal.
As somebody who grew up with the metric system and had to be Impericalised I can groan too, especially as I found out (the hard way), the English don’t have the same gallon as you do. Does my ‘effing’ head in!
Or try and argue the tolerance of a detail on a mechanical fitting you have designed where all the measurements on the drawing is in metric exept the tolerance (which incidently was put there by my boss)!! Ok, I need to have a lie down.
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August 5th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Nevertheless. I can just as easily think in tenth of an inch as I can in mm and given that the Americans haven’t signed on to SI across the board, I can also think in REM/RAD or Gray/Sievert.
At any rate the blog owner sets the conventions. I would think, and if he wants to use yards, no one commenting should think they can scold him for not using metres.
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August 5th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
DV82XL said:
Meh, I can almost think in base-16. Took a lot of practice. Had to learn the 16’s complements and the hexadecimal multiplication table by rote and create a long list of reference points(e.g. avogadros constant is 7.F8*10^13, where 16 in subscript following each number has been omitted for the sake of convenience)
It is regretable that it becomes so ambiguous and clumsy in speech(e.g. if I say “ten”, do I mean 0xA, which is 10 in decimal, or do I mean 0×10 which is 16 in decimal? I could say “B-teen”, “C-teen”, “D-teen”, “F-teen”; but “A-teen” sounds much too close to eighteen)
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August 5th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Matte said:
Geez … this is what computers are for.
They have computer programs for this, you know. These programs go back at least as far as the seventies (e.g., “units” was included in Unix v7, which was released in 1979).
These days, “units” will let you convert 16 different types of “cubit.” And you thought that Imperial units were frustratingly complex and ambiguous.
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August 5th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Matte said:
It’s not imperial! The current imperial system of weights and measures was formalized in 1824, having had most of the units exist far far far before that. It’s British.
The Röntgen was not adopted until 1923 and was not Britsh. The unit was adopted by an international body and was based on research in the United States, France, Belgium and Germany into radiation measurement by ionization. The curie was based on Marie Curie referencing radium-226 and later refined to be the equivalent of one gram of Ra-226. She was Polish and did most of her research in France. The REM is wholly American, as far as I am aware, although it too was adopted internationally.
Not only that, but these units all conform to metric prefixes. You can have a millirem or a microrem or a millicurie or a kilocurie or a microrad or… anything else.
Simply put: There is absolutely nothing imperial about them.
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August 5th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Units? Get over it! See my course website to learn to “multiply by one” to convert. Today I was looking for eV for typical organic molecule binding energies. The published units were kJ/mole!
Seriously, I’m studying Alison’s work, and also hormesis. Low level readiation may disrupt occasional DNA, but it is repairaable! Note that the DOUBLE helix DNA is redundant. Each protein is paired with its opposite. Cells repair DNA damage, typically at the amazing rate of 1 per second per cell. Most damage is from oxidizers such as O3+. There are about 10**14 cells in the human body. How many cells will get zapped by 1 Bq? One per second? That’s why I want to know how many eV it takes to disturb a protein. If it’s just 1 eV then a 1 MeV gamma might disturb 10**6 cells (out of 10**14). And only a tiny part of the cell is DNA — and it mostly gets repaired.
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August 6th, 2010 at 3:39 am
drbuzz0 said:
US Institute of Standards and Measurements (or what ever they are called), their official standpoint is to strongly discourage the use of RAD, REM and Ci…officially anyway.
Hmmmm…98% of my collegues would disagree with your stand point of the Imperial units, this is of course the same type of people who still maintain that the sun never sets in the British empire and lament the fact that India is independent. I might add that I cut the average age by a third in this group, most of them should have been retired 5-10 years ago. The remaining 2% are foreigners, like me!
Rober,
I am convinced that if you are submitted to an increased radiation field the human cells will produce more of the proteins responsible for the DNA repair mechanism, up to a limit at a guess.
1 Bq of what? The energy and intensity of the incomming radiation is what is important. A 1 MeV gamma will most liekly pass right through you, if it does scatter I believe you are right, it will cause damage to a lot of cells but then this is firmly in the realm of quantum physics, I only do physics strictly in the valence electron level and cheat a bit in nuclear engineering…
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August 6th, 2010 at 5:11 am
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August 6th, 2010 at 5:20 am
Matte said:
Sounds like a typical case of summer slump. The story did not make it into the major German newspapers (I wasn’t aware of it until I read it here) but some southern German local papers carried it.
Matte said:
I could help you with a translation if you think you have a good source.
Also, according to the data of the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten”, about one fifth of the boars analyzed exceeded the 600 beq/kg limit, a number that rose to one half in some regions (Freudenstadt and Calw where listed, both situated in valleys in otherwise hilly terrain, which, presumably, increased fallout). According to their research, the contamination of boars is due to a very high concentration of Cs in a kind of truffel that they like to eat, which has the astonishing average contamination of 24000 beq/kg.
I think the reason why this actually made a story is because in Germany, a large portion of the boars that are hunted are served in restaurants. It is, as Mr. Buzzo pointed out, a delicacy (though still common enough) and not a food staple. No restaurant can afford to have an article written about it for ’serving contaminated meat’, so they are quite picky. Being picky means less boars are served and hunted and, lacking any natural predators, they breed like crazy and become a problem. Even though they usually stay clear of cities, they just LOVE destroying cornfields.
Satan_Klaus
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August 6th, 2010 at 7:33 am
Matte said:
They used to have a different “billion” and “trillion” as Americans too. It’s something to be careful about when reading British documents that were written before the mid-1970’s.
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August 6th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
The saddest thing about that article is that, if the contamination levels in the boar meat was really that hazardous, it would have killed off the boar already.
As for the units, if you don’t like his choice of units, go write your own blog. Granted, I’m a little biased, since I work in the nuclear field and use those units all of the time. Though we deal with pCi/g instead of mCi/kg. The latter would leave us dealing with decimals way too much for my taste.
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August 10th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
But what about the mushrooms? Surely more of us eat mushrooms than boar, and are more likely to be served mushrooms than boar in European restaurants. Nowhere in the articles is mentioned a calculation for the radiation in mushrooms.
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August 10th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
clarke said:
It’s less likely that they would constitute a major proportion of your diet, as it does with boar. Presumably there is the issue of bioaccumulation because this is a food boar eat as a major dietary staple.
Also, I don’t know how it is in Europe, but in North America, nearly all mushrooms eaten by humans are grown in mushroom farms, usually inside in caves or dark rooms. The only exception to this being truffles, which are the kind of thing that generally are not eaten in large quantities very often.
There are hundreds of species of wild mushroom in North America. Most of them are toxic and many are deadly even in small quantities. Only a few are eatable and, of those, they are notoriously difficult to tell apart from similar-looking deadly mushrooms. there are only a couple of exceptions to this. Most of these mushrooms are happy to grow in cultivated areas though, so there’s no point in going mushroom hunting unless you’re an expert and looking for a very specific and abnormal type – or if you have a death wish.
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August 10th, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Do read Wormwod Forest, about the aftermath of Chernobyl and the animal life that has returned to the areas vacated by humans. There is a lot of good information about mushrooms, radioactive hogs, etc. Many animals are quite radioactive, with little effect on them. The book is quantitative.
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August 10th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Not to nitpick, but there are plenty of easily recognizable varieties of edible mushrooms -many of which are not commonly commercially cultivated- that hobbyist mushroom hunters can look for. The trick is to learn a species defining characteristics such as color, smell, shape of the gills, etc, and reject any that do not have ALL of the characteristics of a known good species. There are plenty of guides on how to recognize good species and where to find them, but the best way to get started is to find someone who’s experienced at mushroom hunting and have them take you along to show you.
To say that mushroom hunting is nothing but seeking ones own untimely demise is needlessly negative.
—
But anyway, I highly doubt that eating mushrooms that are growing downwind of Chernobyl is going to be much of a radiation hazard to be concerned about.
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August 10th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Nick P. said:
No it isn’t, however it is an activity one needs to be be properly trained, and be aware of the types in the area you hunt in. It is not something the uninitiated should attempt, with nothing more than a Peterson’s Field Guide, and enthusiasm.
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August 10th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Nick P. said:
Be that as it may, there is no way in hell you’d ever get me to eat wild mushrooms, unless perhaps they had been certified by several major organizations and laboratories as being non-toxic and I had already seen several people eat them and not die after a month and also have consistently perfect blood work for liver and kidney levels for several weeks after.
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August 10th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
drbuzz0 said:
This is the point where all I can do is stare blankly at an attitude and worldview I Do Not Understand and move on.
Different strokes for different folks I guess.
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August 10th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Nick P. said:
It has a lot to do with the fact that I just plain don’t like mushrooms, so it would give me an excuse not to eat them if I were somehow presented with pressure to do so.
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August 10th, 2010 at 11:05 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Fair enough.
I guess using that as a reason for not wanting to try something wouldn’t leave much room for the “But you haven’t had THIS one before have you? You might like it if you try it!” kind of dickering that those situations often devolve into.
Anyway, I’ll stop derailing things at this point.
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August 11th, 2010 at 1:52 am
To back Nick P’s case a little here, I suspect mushroom hunting is more commonly followed in Europe than North America.
I can’t really comment on Germany, but I know that one of the oft-repeated factoids about French pharmacies is that you can take any wild mushrooms you find in and they will happily (and freely) identify those that are safe to eat for you to go home and cook up. The idea of going out randomly collecting mushrooms and putting them under a pharmacist’s nose to find out which are safe is relatively common in rural France.
Bear in mind that French pharmacists are considerably better trained and more highly respected than pharmacists in most countries – the UK in particular. The French will often go to a pharmacist for treatment rather than their GP if they think they have only minor ailments.
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August 13th, 2010 at 4:32 am
Alright, as the resident German I feel the need to clear things up a bit.
In Germany, collecting mushrooms is not as common as it used to be, but many people still do it. It is rarely done for a living but is instead a layman’s passtime and combined with a sunday walk in the forest, which is one of the traditional German recreational activities. There are quite a few species of mushroom that can be collected safely by laymen because there are no native toxic mushrooms that look similar. The more difficult to distinguish species are ignored and left to the professional collectors who supply restaurants and even upmarket supermarkets with mushrooms that can’t be cultivated (many don’t grow outside of the forrest).
The button mushroom is the most common mushroom in German cuisine and perfectly safe to eat (both from a toxicological and radiological viewpoint) because it is cultivated in underground farms.
Regarding the radioactive contamination of wild mushrooms:
I quoted the average contamination of the “Hirschtrüffel” (Elaphomyces) (Sorry can’t find an english translation of the comomn name) from a major German newspaper as 24000 beq/kg. This is quite a lot, but still not deadly. Basing your diet exclusively on it might result in health problems, though. Also, this kind of truffel is considered non-edible (it’s not poisonous, just disgusting).
The very high concentration in this species of mushroom is explained by its biological tendency to absorb large amount of Cs, and also the fact that it, like most underground mushrooms, is a perennial species. It has a lot more time to absorb radioactive material and tends to concentrate it. The surface part of most collected mushrooms on the other hand lives just a month or two.
Here is a link to a list of Radioactivity in commonly collected mushrooms in Germany ( http://uwa.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/1607.html ). Most mushrooms measure in the low hundreds or below, though there are some very high exceptions in the thousands of Beq/kg range.
When considering mushroom contamination, one should remember that wild Mushrooms are usually just a garnish or an ingredient for the sauce and probably don’t make up more than 10% of the weight of the meal. And even then, meals containing wild mushrooms are rarely consumed more often then once in ten days. So the radioactive contamination of mushrooms should be divided by 100 when comparing it to that of food staples like wheat.
According to my data, all wild mushrooms (and all wild boars) in Germany should be safe to eat from a radiological viewpoint, when enjoyed in moderation.
I hope that answers all open questions.
Satan_Klaus
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August 14th, 2010 at 11:26 am
Several years old, but still interesting
Fungi Gobble Radiation to Grow, Study Says
Some fungi eat radiation to fuel their growth, a new study suggests.
Three species of fungi containing the black pigment melanin—a substance also present in human skin—grew larger and faster when exposed to high levels of radiation, even when deprived of nutrients. A similar response was not seen in fungi lacking the pigment, as well as in fungi that did not receive the radiation exposure.
Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at New York’s Yeshiva University were inspired by previous observations of enhanced fungus growth inside the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, after the reactor at the Ukrainian facility exploded in 1986.
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