Me and my big mouth

[blueadzuki]

Hi all.
Well today's searches yielded something truly astonishing (and not neccecarily in a good way) You remember when I said (somewhat facetiosly) that with all of the odd crap I find in bags of beans and whatnot, "It would not suprise me to find a rosary pea in a bag of something one day" well look at the bag of senna below


Yes, that bright orange spot is a seed of Abrus precatorius. How it got into a bag of senna I have no clue. But now I can officially say "ANYTHING can show up" and mean it frankly. I suppose I really ought to alert someone in the USDA (after all, unlike most of the things that show up in bags, this is poisionous enough to represent a real danger to anyone who might have bought the bag to consume it and wasn't paying attention (or maybe not, I know rosary peas are only actually dangerous if you break them before consumption and that they usually need to be scarified if you want to grow them. I'm not sure if the quick hot water shock bath it would get if someone was making senna tea would be enough. Plus given the other kind of stuff that shows up, I would assime any Chinese person buying senna seed to make tea would pick the seed over first, and something like this would be so obvios it would have to be noticed.) But this seems to be the only one and I'm inclined to think of it as a 1/1,000,000 thing.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

one seed is hardly anything to worry about.

[oxbowfarm]

I had to Google it. I'd never heard of Rosary pea or abrin.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Yikes! With the lethal dose being in the millionths of a gram that would be alarming if someone were to grind their sena seeds to make tea.

"A 37-year-old man was severely poisoned after ingesting half a seed"

[richardw]

Its a wonder the person packing it didnt see it,

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

The toxin would become inert if one were to use it to make hot tea. Plus grinding it with the rest would dillute its concentraton, and the water dilute it even more. Again one seed in a pack like this is nothing to be saying yikes about.

[blueadzuki]

Feb 7, 2013 4:19:21 GMT -5 keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) said:

The toxin would become inert if one were to use it to make hot tea. Plus grinding it with the rest would dillute its concentraton, and the water dilute it even more. Again one seed in a pack like this is nothing to be saying yikes about.

I'm not so sure it would. According to wikipedia, Abrin is a pretty stable compound, so heat might not denature it. As for dilution, yes it would, but not enough. As Joeseph pointed out the LD50 for abrin is something on the order of millionths of a gram so to flip it around you need several millions of grams of diluting material before the dose dropped down low enough not to be dangerous. The whole bag weighs 454 grams. Plus since no one would use (and therfore grind) up the entire bag at once, the actual amount being used when and if the seed got ground would be on the order of maybe 10-20 grams of senna. I agree now that one seed isn't enough to get worried about but that is because I am fairly sure 1. anyone using it would have picked it over before using it (senna is pretty heavily weed contaminated stuff even without this, since is is such a small seed (smaller seed=more things that can slip by in a sorting machine) so taking an unpicked spoonfull and using it would be a pretty rough experiance anyway. and 2. you don't grind the seeds to make the tea (my knowledge of Chinese herbal medicine is a bit sketchy, but I am fairy sure that to use senna seeds to make tea, they simply take a spoonfull or so, put it in a kettle whole, pour hot water on it, and let it steep for a few minutes.

As for how it got missed richardw my best guess is that, when it entered the bag, it was in the middle of the stream, and wasn't visible. I saw it in the store because it was near the edge of the bag, but I had to "fluff" the bag a little when I got home and put it on the scanner to make it visible again. It also happens that, amongst the other non senna things that were in the bags were a fair number of seeds of horse gram (Macrotyloma uniflorum or Dolichos biflorus) This in and of itself is normal, horse gram is a pretty common senna contaminant (indeed despite the fact that these bags (like every other bag of senna I've ever seen say "Product of China" I've often thought the stuff must actually be grown closer to India, since a lot of the contaminants are common Indian crops (horse gram, guar beans, kenaf seed and so on) Or I could just be that whatever part of China they grow it in grows the same sort of crops.) However some of those grams were an unusually red color for horse grams, sort of a red kidney bean color (gram seed is usually a sort of pinky tan or mottled greyish tan, though brick and jet black seed is not uncommon.) I don't think it's likey someone could mistake an orange rosary pea for a maroon horse gram bean, but if the packing house was poorly lit, I suppose it is just possible.
As for why something like that would even be growing where food was being grown, that is more easily explained. Rosary peas have a LOT of uses in Asia, and indeed in most of the world. Becuse of their coloration, they are still popular to make jewelry and amulets (though wearing these is a bit risky, as you have to drill holes in the seeds to string them, and cases of posioning (though usually non-fatal) by drilled seeds by absorbtion through the skin are fairly common.) In India they have a big use in gold work. The seeds are remarkably uniform in size and weight, and so are often used to weigh out gold (much as people used to use carob seeds to weigh out precious stones, from which we get the word "carat") and when crushed form a sort of glue used to attach gold wires together while being melted. A lot of tropical gardens have the vines, which supposedly can be used to predict the weather (the plant is sometimes called "barometer vine").

[12540dumont]

I can see easily how this could happen. Although none of my weeds are poisonous, it's easy to get them in the seed if I'm not careful.

[blueadzuki]

Feb 7, 2013 11:13:43 GMT -5 12540dumont said:

I can see easily how this could happen. Although none of my weeds are poisonous, it's easy to get them in the seed if I'm not careful.

Especially when the size of the seed of the weeds and the size of the seed of the product you are selling are more or less the same. Very large seeds tend to be pretty clean, since most weeds are smaller than them and fall out though the sorting screen. Ditto very very small ones only in this case its everything bigger tends to be left on the screen. But things in the middle tend to have a lot of the field refuse come along with them, vegetable, mineral (I actually once found a tiny fossilized shell in a bag of seed I got from M.L. Farrar) and animal i.e. insect bits and rodent droppings (I actually have a little vial in my insect collection that has two Asian ladybugs I found in coriander bags).

[robertb]

China shares a border with India so it probably comes from that part of the Himalayas.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

I'm not so sure it would. According to wikipedia, Abrin is a pretty stable compound, so heat might not denature it.

also according wikipedia:

Abrus precatorius, called kudri mani in Tamil and guru ginja in Telugu, has been used in Siddha medicine for centuries. The Tamil Siddhars knew about the toxic effects in plants and suggested various methods which is called "suththi seythal" or purification. This is done by boiling the seeds in milk and then drying them. The protein is denatured when subjected to high temperatures which removes it toxicity

[bertiefox]

Those saying 'one seed won't do any harm' are completely missing the point. The issue here is one of food adulteration and contamination. You should get what it says on the label and nothing else. Over here in Europe we have just discovered that many processed meat products don't contain beef as claimed but are 100% horse meat from unknown sources in Romania.
If you can't believe the label, how do you know you are buying organic when it claims that or GM free?
This is about consumer rights. Once the multinational food giants know they can put any crap in a bag and sell it to gullible consumers, they won't stop at the odd seed or odd lump of horse meat. We will be back to the 19th century when flour was adulterated with chalk and even arsenic!
Or maybe we are on the road to Soylent Green?

[zeedman]

Quote: "... The protein is denatured when subjected to high temperatures which removes it toxicity."

It also says "citation needed" and "dubious". Given the grammar, I wouldn't bet my life on "denaturing" something that is 75 times more toxic than ricin.

While I am not a fan of government intervention in our daily affairs, this situation warrants it... the presence of that seed in food should be grounds for an immediate recall. I doubt that the plant which spawned that seed produced only one, other packages might contain multiple seeds.

[blueadzuki]

For the record, I popped into the same store where I bought the senna again yesterday. They still are selling the same brand, but I looked each bag and saw no further peas. While I admit this is far from definitive (as I said, without buying the bag, ripping it open and sorting through it, the only way I could see a pea is if it was really close to the surface. Plus I would assume that what I see in one store is probably only a tiny fraction of the amount that packing house produces.) it does lend a little credence to that being a fluke occurance.