this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
125 points (95.0% liked)
Asklemmy
44129 readers
711 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I am not a Microbial Pathogensist, so I'll just use the internet's preferred method of saying something confidently that is probably wrong on some pedantic level and having actual experts climb out of the woodwork to correct me, but...
Mold isn't a single organism, it's actually a colony of many individual microbes that work together, most of the time; there are exceptions since the word "mold" is a lay term as much as it's a scientific term, and the common usage doesn't have the same rigor applied ("if it's slimy/fuzzy, it's mold" kinda reasoning).
The colony aspect is important, because you're probably inhaling mold spores and eating tiny amounts of mold every day. The microbial aspect means that eating a whole colony has the potential to infect you even if your body kills off 99.9% of the microbes.
As to why an infection is dangerous depends on the type of mold. Some take up resisdence in specific organs and starve the organ cells of vital nutrients, others are carnivorous and eat your tissues/cells, others may eat beneficial bacteria or starve them of vital nutrients, some secrete toxins that are relatively harmless in small doses but deadly with a full-blown infection—penicillin is a great well-known example of this: it's the chemical the mold uses to kill off bacteria competing for the same resources—, sometimes it's just the immune system's response that's dangerous.
If you want an example of what such an infection does on our scale, look up everyone psychonaut's favorite: Ergotism. The Ergot fungus grows primarily on cereals/grains and secretes chemicals that are psychoactive in humans (one of which is the precursor that Dr. Albert Hoffmann first derived LSD from). Unfortunately besides mind expanding insights into the nature of reality, it also comes with a nasty infection that can cause convulsions, painful burning/tingling/freezing sensations, diarrhea, vomiting, gangrene, psychosis, and more.
That all being said, if you accidentally swallow a bite of moldy bread, you probably don't need to freak out and call poison control/EMS; just don't regularly eat moldy food and expect to have your immune system stave off a full-blown infection for long.