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Fish Poison Makes Hot Feel Cold and Vice Versa

Posted by kdawson on Sun Oct 14, 2007 03:58 AM
from the rhymes-with-fugu dept.
Biotech Science
SoyChemist writes "Ciguatoxin causes bizarre neurological symptoms including temperature reversal, a burning sensation, and an imaginary feeling of loose teeth. It is produced by algae and accumulates in the fatty flesh of tropical fish. While traveling to the tropics, a man from England ate some bad seafood that contained the unusual poison. His story, and the tale of some unfortunate sailors of an earlier age who suffered the same affliction, appeared in the current issue of Practical Neurology and was summarized on the Wired Science Blog. Both the Wired blog and the peer-reviewed journal neglected to mention that the potent neurotoxin has been made from scratch by organic chemists."
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Submission: Fish Poison Makes Hot Feel Cold and Cold feel Hot by SoyChemist (1015349)
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  • Paradoxical Dysaesthesia (Score:5, Funny)

    by die444die (766464) on Sunday October 14 2007, @04:14AM (#20972255)
    paradoxical dysaesthesia is hot.

  • Remember when... (Score:5, Informative)

    by The_Mystic_For_Real (766020) on Sunday October 14 2007, @04:15AM (#20972261)
    Remember when submitters used to mark links that required payment?

  • Cool! (Score:4, Funny)

    by sahar176 (1046492) on Sunday October 14 2007, @04:37AM (#20972327)
    Errr I mean...Hot!

  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by evilviper (135110) on Sunday October 14 2007, @04:41AM (#20972343) Journal

    Ciguatoxin causes bizarre neurological symptoms including temperature reversal,

    Ah yes, good old XNOR poison... It's been a long time old friend.

    • Ah yes, good old XNOR poison

      Wouldn't that be NOT poison, or is that something else?

      • Wouldn't that be NOT poison,

        Yes that's much closer to accurate, but you'll sound awfully stupid talking about "not poison".

        • Yes that's much closer to accurate, but you'll sound awfully stupid talking about "not poison".

          Yeah, and universities are going to be throwing honorary doctorates at you for talking about "XNOR poison". Then again, people tell me I see things only in black and white.
    • A XNOR temperature poison would be one that made you and your friend feel both hot or both cold after eating the same fish. Sort of a subtle effect for a poison.

  • Ciguatera is Common knowledge (Score:5, Informative)

    by waimate (147056) on Sunday October 14 2007, @04:47AM (#20972363) Homepage
    C'mon, this is common knowledge among people who hang around the pacific. If you catch a large fish, don't eat the whole thing... eat some, and share around to dilute the risk. People have known this for over 30 years. Large fish have higher risk just because they are older.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciguatera [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Ciguatera is Common knowledge (Score:5, Funny)

      by ianalis (833346) on Sunday October 14 2007, @05:14AM (#20972457) Homepage
      Share it... for mutually assured destruction :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by BillX (307153)
        And to avoid your friends thinking you're loony toony.

        Without sharing:
        "Oww, this fish is too piping hot to eat!" - You
        "Umm, are you going crazy? This dish is served cold." -Everyone Else

        With sharing:
        "Ack, this shit's too hot!" - You
        "Right on brother." - Everyone

    • Re:Ciguatera is Common knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Otter (3800) on Sunday October 14 2007, @07:28AM (#20972925) Journal
      It's been known to Europeans for hundreds of years, and presumably to natives for much longer. (I had a very mild case in Belize a few years ago, from a barracuda.)

      Incidentally, for those wondering why the synthesis of this is newsworthy, check out the structures [qmul.ac.uk] of this and similar marine toxins. The synthesis of palytoxin, at the bottom, supposedly sent a number of grad students and postdocs to the hospital, as its intermediates are also insanely toxic.

      • Re:Ciguatera is Common knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Sethb (9355) <bokelman@gmail.com> on Sunday October 14 2007, @09:16AM (#20973419) Homepage
        Yep, I was in Fiji in July, and they served some fish at our resort that was poisoned. I didn't eat any, my mom ate a small bit, but was fine. The resort owner and one other guest were quite ill for days, and their cat that ate the leftovers nearly died. Apparently there's no way to tell if the fish is infected, and cooking it doesn't destroy the toxin.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Otter (3800)
          I just had the nausea and diarrhea, along with chills. None of the really freaky symptoms like they talk about here, or the long term recurrences. Like I said, it was a very mild case. The restaurant owner followed the OP's logic and slightly poisoned 20 people instead of badly harming one or two.
    • Ah, so you got it from Agnes?

  • About the journal this appeared in... (Score:3, Funny)

    by mdenham (747985) on Sunday October 14 2007, @04:51AM (#20972375)
    ...would "Practical Neurology" be where you go if you're planning on having a drinking buddy do your brain surgery?

  • Where to order? (Score:5, Funny)

    by clarkkent09 (1104833) on Sunday October 14 2007, @05:19AM (#20972471)
    The article failed to mention where can I get some of this poison? I need to cut down on my heating bill this winter.

    • Re:Where to order? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by artifex2004 (766107) on Sunday October 14 2007, @06:34AM (#20972737) Journal

      The article failed to mention where can I get some of this poison? I need to cut down on my heating bill this winter.


      Ethanol is commonly known to give feelings of warmth [wikipedia.org], ; in fact, the movie A Time For Drunken Horses [imdb.com] is so named because the winter weather is so harsh that the only way the Iranian Kurds can get horses to work is to give them liquor.
      • But would it be better used for actually heating your home?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by evilviper (135110)

        Ethanol is commonly known to give feelings of warmth

        With the pleasant trade-off of causing death by hypothermia instead...

      • Re:Where to order? (Score:5, Informative)

        by pla (258480) on Sunday October 14 2007, @09:53AM (#20973647) Journal
        Ethanol is commonly known to give feelings of warmth

        Except, it doesn't just make you feel warm - It reduces your body's natural tendancy to hoarde blood in your core when the outside temperature drops, thus actually warming your skin and periphery.

        Of course, on the down side, with warmer skin you lose heat faster, and when your core temperature drops a few degrees, you go into hypothermia (and to make matters worse, with a few drinks in you, you might not notice until too late).

    • Re:Where to order? (Score:5, Funny)

      by iknownuttin (1099999) on Sunday October 14 2007, @06:51AM (#20972783)
      The article failed to mention where can I get some of this poison? I need to cut down on my heating bill this winter.

      This is nice and everything, but I want know what the hell is my wife taking that makes her cold even when I'm sweating bullets!

      • It's pretty clear to me: Your wife is a fish.

      • You're lucky (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "what the hell is my wife taking that makes her cold even when I'm sweating bullets!"

        Don't worry, in a few more years, she'll be feeling hot all the time. And she'll yell at you a lot. For no reason you're aware of.

        But on the plus side, all your hair will fall out, and your children will consider you stupid. Which, all things considered, you are.

  • Botete (Score:3, Interesting)

    by photomonkey (987563) on Sunday October 14 2007, @05:23AM (#20972481)

    In the Sea of Cortés (Golfo de California), there is a fish known by locals as the 'botete'. It is a type of puffer fish. It causes exactly this kind of problem.

    Very interesting the way neurotoxins work...

  • French? (Score:3, Funny)

    by youthoftoday (975074) on Sunday October 14 2007, @05:31AM (#20972517) Homepage Journal
    Fish poisson?

  • Nice curiosity, but what are the applications? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist (166417) on Sunday October 14 2007, @06:07AM (#20972651)
    It would be great if we found a way to selectively "switch" some receptors. Like, when people suffer from burns to ease their pain. Or maybe in a deodorant that tells your skin it's freezing so you don't sweat in the first place.

    The former I'm not too sure about (whether it works or is even a good idea), the latter sounds silly to me, so what could we make out of that? I'm usually not someone asking for applications for a discovery to be "useful", but this is intriguing. Anyone got an idea what to do with that?
    • Or maybe in a deodorant that tells your skin it's freezing so you don't sweat in the first place.

      What, you don't have antiperspirants in your country already?
      • Sure, but wouldn't it be interesting to get a "cool and fresh" feeling through poison? :)
        • Awesome! I can't wait to read this on the back of deodorant spray cans:

          PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant will give your skin a cool and fresh feeling and will prevent sweating for up to twenty years.

          Known possible side effects include prickling of the skin, headaches, numbness, diarrhea, vomiting, dehydration, hyperthermia, hallucinations, lung failure, kidney failure, cardiac arrest, an atypical form of Parkinson's disease, coma and death.

          Not to be taken orally. Keep out of the reach of small children.

          Warning: PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant is known to build up in the groundwater and in animals. Any object that has been in direct contact with PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant at any point as well as the remains of persons, cremated or not, who have used PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant at any point may not be disposed of normally and must be handed over to the Environmental Protection Agency as per the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act ("Superfund Act") of 1980.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Abeydoun (1096003)
      As a matter of fact, that's what methanol does. One of it's characteristics is to selectively stimulate the cool-feeling receptors of your skin while leaving practically everything else alone. And on the other hand, there's capsasin, everyone's favorite ingredient in salsa.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Abeydoun (1096003)
        urgh... meant to say menthol, not methanol. Bah, guess that's what happens when you skip a night of sleep.
  • the potent neurotoxin has been made from scratch by organic chemists ...who are at this moment being transported to Guantanamo Bay for "re-education".

  • Loose teeth? Englishman? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dissolved (887190) on Sunday October 14 2007, @06:25AM (#20972711)
    Given the state of our NHS and the mythical availability of dental treatment, I wouldn't put the blame for any feeling of loose teeth down to poison alone...

  • Don't give the Bush administration any more ideas.

  • LSD (Score:5, Funny)

    by nurb432 (527695) on Sunday October 14 2007, @07:27AM (#20972921) Homepage Journal
    Can do this too. And cheaper.
  • "... summarized on the Wired Science Blog." or Weird Science Blog, going by the weird scientific articles being posted on there.
  • In soviet russia, unusual fish poison that makes you feel hot as cold and cold as hot makes you feel hot as hot and cold as cold.
  • ....Rectal Cranial Inversion. Sadly, most people already suffer from the latter without knowing.

  • amusing? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by m2943 (1140797) on Sunday October 14 2007, @09:12AM (#20973395)
    described the amusing case in the October issue of Practical Neurology

    Amusing?

    including temperature reversal, intense pruritus and increased nociception [...] improved over a period of 10 months

    This sounds very unpleasant. This might be amusing if it happened to Osama, but otherwise, this isn't something you'd wish on someone's dog.

  • What doctors do these folks go to? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xPsi (851544) * on Sunday October 14 2007, @10:54AM (#20974031)
    I always enjoy reading stories like this where some interesting or subtle medical effect is at work. It evokes images of proactive doctors working closely with patients to really understand their problems and symptoms, delving deep into the pathology of whatever condition they are complaining about. But in my experience, typical doctors in the US are not in the least bit interested in actually studying medical conditions that come across their desk (or, more appropriately, forwarding the situation on to a research pathologist). They usually have a pragmatic "if it hurts when you do that, then don't do that" or "if you are bleeding, I can help you but otherwise you are on your own" attitude. If I came to my doctor and said "hot and cold are reversed after I ate some shellfish," I'm pretty sure the response would be "then don't eat it next time, it just happens to some unlucky people. Drink some water, get some rest, it will go away in a month. That will be $200. Next!" In fact, I'm pretty sure the discussion of shellfish wouldn't even come up because the conversation never seems to get as far as that. I speak with some experience here because I have suffered from a couple of unusual (but not deadly) medical conditions. The response is always the same: "some unlucky people just have that and we don't know why. Have a nice day." Is it something I ate? Something I did? Something in my physiology? Something genetic? "We don't know. Have a nice day." But wouldn't they want to know? I blame this intellectual laziness on HMOs, which tend to put otherwise motivated doctors in a terrible bind. If a doctor wants to do some test to study an unusual condition, they have to justify it to a big business that will determine if the procedure was "necessary." If the procedure is deemed unnecessary but is done anyway, then the patient gets stuck with the bill. If the patient defaults, then the doctor must pay out of pocket. Such procedures are usually very expensive and doctors who do informative procedures that the HMO deems "unnecessary" (even if they are totally legitimate) can easily go bankrupt. In short, there is no motivation for doctors under HMOs to go the extra mile to really understand the cases they are studying in detail.

    • Re:Umm...Psychoactive drugs? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bucc5062 (856482) <bucc5062.gmail@com> on Sunday October 14 2007, @07:58AM (#20973043)

      This isn't "News for Nerds", this is news for the guy who sells you pot.


      Why is the assumption always that /. is only for computer nerds. I've met a few scientists in other fields in my time and they seem just as "nerdy" as my fellow programmers. Some may even stay in the basement of their Mom's house chopping up body parts or mixing toxic chemicals together.

      Either you are new to /. and miss the point that even politics, toxins, and robots can effect "nerds/geeks", you have a secret phobia against fish, or miss the point of just how cool this article is to the community at large.

      Personally, I have enjoyed the odd view some of my fellow /.'ers have posted regarding this article. I also appreciate the news so that when I travel to the Pacific someday, I will take care eating fish.

      Enjoy the moment, we have so few.
       

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