The Silent Threat: A Potato Poisoning Tragedy Case

Everyday, there is always a medical condition that needs to be treated, managed, or attended to, some of these cases will be written in journals while so many of them will not find their ways to journals either because of lack of documentation or other reasons. That said, I will be writing about a case of poisoning that occurred in August 2014, in Laishevo, the Republic of Tatarstan which claimed the life of almost an entire family.

It was a tragic day for the Chelysheva family as their supposed dinner was going to be their last as a family and only their eight year old daughter Maria would survive. She saw her father descend into the root cellar in the house to grab potatoes that would prepare that night but he didn't come back after a long time, and this caused her mother to check him but then both of them didn't return to their family.

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This got her brother worried, so he decided to check them at the basement but he also didn't return. After a long time, her grandmother decided to check on them so they can have their dinner in peace but it looked like something was swallowing them up in the cellar because her grand mother also didn't return but before she did so, she called her neighbors that she suspected something was wrong as her family members . The made her to go into the cellar to check what was happening and she saw them. What could it had been that was killing them?

When she got to the cellar, he could smell a putrid, dead odor emanating from the cellar. In the cellar, she found the bodies of her father, mother, grandmother, and brother on the floor and this took her from being the youngest in the family to being the only survivor in the family. So what happened to her family?

Historical cases of potato poisonings have been documented, dating back to 1925 when a family of seven experienced vomiting, exhaustion, trouble breathing, and loss of consciousness, resulting in the death of two family members. Similarly, in 1918, 61 people fell ill, and a five-year-old boy lost his life due to eating bad potatoes in Scotland.

A time when there was a high number of people affected was in North Korea, in the year 1952 when famine caused the people to eat rotten potatoes which led to over 300 people falling ill from eating the potatoes, with 52 people being hospitalized and lots of people died as a result of intense cases which led to people dying of heart failure, big heart, and coma.

While a lot of these circumstances had to do with eating the potatoes, the case of the Chelysheva's isn't so, because they didn't the potatoes. So what could have gone wrong? While potatoes can be sweet, delicious, or marshy if pressed, they can be poisonous if not properly stored because potato a variant of nightshades which is part of the Solanaceae family which includes other plants like Tomato, eggplant, goji berries, tobacco, and petunias but not forgetting the deadly nightshades.

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Nightshade plants contain alkaloids (any base that contains nitrogen) and they are bad for us. In the case of the Chelyshevas' their poisoning was as a result of Solanine which is produced to protect themselves from insects and Solanine in our body can trigger symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, paralysis of the central nervous system, headache, coma, and possibly death. While you have to consume a large amount of potato up to 20 pounds for a 200 pounds person, when it gets rotten, the solanine toxicity can increase 10 times.

While it is still unclear what happened, there is a theory that says that solanine opens PT channels in cell membrane lowering the membrane potential leading to calcium ion build up in the cell which triggers apoptosis (programmed cell death). Since they didn't eat the potatoes, what could have happened. A better explanation would be that since the potatoes were kept in a store, they can begin to grow as a result of exposure to light increasing chlorophyll and solanine in the store.

In the case of the family, the Solanine leaked out in gaseous form and the longer the potatoes stay in the cellar the more solanine gas in the cellar. The hypothesis remain that the family got into the cellar and passed out as a result of hypoxia. The reason Maria survived is because her grandmother left the door to the cellar opened.

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Reference

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2409920
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/horrific-tales-of-potatoes-that-caused-mass-sickness-and-even-death-3162870/
https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-about-nightshade-vegetables#1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4087866/
https://inchem.org/documents/jecfa/jecmono/v30je19.htm
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/storing_potatoes_for_quality_and_food_safety