If you’ve been following our channel a while, you’ll know that there are a lot of hidden
dangers in the world – some of which you regularly drink!
If you look at the British tabloid media in 2013, you might find a story that tells you
a man literally drank himself to death.
And no, it wasn’t alcohol.
The poor guy just drank 3 liters of Cola a day and topped it up with water.
His lungs swelled after a binge and it was game over for him.
There was a similar story in the UK a year before, about a woman who drank 18 pints (8.5
liters) of Cola a day, which was blamed for her early demise.
Even drinking too much water too fast can lead to a very painful death.
But today we get stranger, in this episode of the Infographics Show, How drinking milk
can kill you.
Before we tell you how this happens, we’ll tell you about the most famous victim of milk
death.
Her name was Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and she was the mother of the famous former American
president, Abraham Lincoln.
She died of what was called “Milk sickness”, on October 5, 1818, at the age of 34, little
Abraham was just nine years old when she passed.
While these days you don’t exactly hear about people dying from drinking milk, back
then 1000s of people in the Midwest got milk sickness and died.
We found one article on the News Watchmen website that told us this: “The history
of milk sickness shows that it was first reported in Ohio about 1810 by Dr. Daniel Drake, of
Cincinnati,” the Ohio Public Health Journal said in 1917.
“So prevalent was the disease at one time in Ohio that it seriously interfered with
migration and development of the state.
Home seekers ‘going west’ would avoid Ohio on account of it.”
As the U.S. National Parks Service explains, when people went down with milk sickness in
those days it was very much a mystery.
Nobody in the beginning knew what was happening.
It was a kind of boogeyman ailment, that looked different from other sicknesses of the time.
That’s because people were in fact being poisoned by a plant called white snakeroot.
The plant has lots of different names, including milk sickness plant, fall poison, deerwort-boneset,
white sanicle and Indian sanicle.
You can find it in different parts of the USA, but it is most common in Indiana, Illinois
and Ohio.
What would happen is that cows would eat the plant and then people would drink the milk
from the cow.
The meat can also become contaminated.
A Doctor Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby first revealed this strange sickness was down to the white
snakeroot plant.
As the legend goes, she was told by a Shawnee (native American) woman.
Fewer people died when word got around – apparently that took some time back then – because
wooded areas were cleared and farm animals wouldn’t be in the vicinity of any white
snakeroot.
White snakeroot contains tremetol, which is toxic to animals and humans.
Very toxic.
We looked at a research paper we found on this toxin and how it would affect people
when they’d ingested it by accident.
Apparently, you don’t just keel over.
The symptoms are gradual.
First, you feel a bit restless and you might have sore muscles.
Soon you won’t want to eat, be able to poo and you will then start throwing up.
You may also start trembling a lot, have bad breath, and suffer from delirium.
The sickness was sometimes called “the trembles”.
Early settlers also called it the “puking sickness” and “the slows.”
Tremetol disrupts glucose metabolism.
Energy is disrupted and so that’s why muscles seize and people tremble.
One scientific paper said, “As the amount of tremetol accumulates, probably in the liver,
the metabolic engine is gradually shut down, and the acidity of ketones results in ketoacidosis,
which is life threatening.”
If you show symptoms, coma and death will likely follow about 2-3 weeks later.
Some people do survive, but they are lucky.
If you happen to have a cow or goat in your keeping, and suddenly it won’t move, goes
very stiff, has muscle spasms, stands with an arched back, you might want to give its
milk a pass until you have had it checked out.
This killer plant might still be the end of an animal’s life, but it is unlikely to
kill a human these days.
Why is that?
First, the last case we could find was when two very young children were admitted to the
Saint Louis, Missouri hospital in 1963.
They were both diagnosed with milk sickness.
The articles don’t say if the kids survived.
They had drunk milk from a cow that had eaten white snakeroot.
But, could it still happen today?
While pasteurization wouldn’t get rid of the contamination, it’s the way that we
produce milk on an industrial scale that is the reason we don’t hear about milk sickness
today.
You see, you don’t usually drink your milk from a single cow.
As one person pointed out on a forum, milk is often delivered in tanks of trucks carrying
around 5,000 gallons of milk, so you’d need many, many cows to fill that tank.
All the milk gets mixed.
Even if one cow had eaten white snakeroot, you wouldn’t be dangerously contaminated
when you had your cereal as the milk would contain the tiniest amount of tremetol.
On top of that, it is very unlikely that pasturelands where animals graze will have white snakeroot
as an option on the menu.
According to Science Direct, it is horses that are in the most danger these days, and
eating white snakeroot is more severe for them.
They eat it and usually die of heart failure.
Nonetheless, if you had milk from one single cow that had munched on this deadly plant
then it is still possible you could get milk sickness.
If you do get it, it’s said there is no treatment.
Death is likely, but you might just beat it.
How many of you had ever heard about milk sickness before?
Let us know in the comments.
Also, be sure to watch our other video called – What Would Happen If You Never Left The
Bathtub?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don't forget to like, share and subscribe, and as
ever, see you next time.