Man gets rare 'shiitake dermatitis' from undercooked mushrooms (www.livescience.com)

submitted 11 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/science@beehaw.org

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[-] fiat_lux@kbin.social 67 points 11 months ago

Poor bastard must have been itchy as fuck. Sadly the article on a shitty ad infested site is also padded out for word count. So here is the important parts. Hand-summarised, unlike the AI-assisted article:

A 72-year-old man presented with a 2-day history of an itchy, linear rash across his back. Two days before symptom onset, he had prepared and eaten a meal containing shiitake mushrooms. - Paywalled report from New England Journal of Medicine
Caused by the carbohydrate lentinan which triggers the release of interleukin-1 (and other chemicals), which causes cause inflammation.
The rash develops usually 2-3 days after eating undercooked shiitake.
Lentinan is broken down when thoroughly cooked at temperatures over 145° C / 293° F

Because fuck shitty pop-science padded journalism and their marketing strategies and hostile UX, and fuck the NEJM too for paywalling medical research.

[-] ToxicWaste@lemm.ee 11 points 11 months ago

Not sure if the 145°C is a citation/translation error by the site. If the mushroom is boiled in water (e.g. hotpot), it will never reach those temperatures.

[-] fiat_lux@kbin.social 9 points 11 months ago

I got it from the quote in the article from the author of the NEJM paper. You're correct, but this seems to also happen in maybe 2% of people, and there's a good chance 145C is only needed to be absolutely certain all sugars have 100% broken down. Hotpots might still get rid of most of it at 100C. I'm not a polysaccharine decomposition expert though, even though I know they're very heat-sensitive.

If you're really worried (which you probably don't need to be given it's rarity), mushrooms can't really be overcooked (unless you literally burn them), so nuking them in the microwave with a thin coat of oil or frying them off will help get them to temp if you want to be really certain.

Second source from non-paywalled:

It affects about 2% of people that consume the mushrooms raw or only lightly cooked... in people of all ages, ... more often male than female.
...shiitake dermatitis is not seen with the ingestion of thoroughly cooked at a temperature > 145 C.
- Shiitake flagellate dermatitis