Science Friday - Race And Medicine, Salmon Recovery, Emergency Mushroom ID. June 10, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Americans’ Knowledge Of Reproductive Health Is Limited As the nation awaits a momentous Supreme Court decision that could overturn or severely limit the 1973 Roe V. Wade opinion on abortion, a new poll released by the Kaiser Family Foundation found serious gaps in Americans’ understanding of certain scientific aspects of reproductive health. For instance, the poll found that while medication abortion now accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., fewer than three in ten U.S. adults (27%) say they have heard of the medication abortion pill known as mifepristone—though that number is up slightly from a 2019 poll, which found that 21% of adults had heard of the medication. And even among those who had heard of it, poll respondents were unsure over when and how it was used, or how to obtain the drug. Rachel Feltman, executive editor at Popular Science, joins John Dankosky to talk about the poll findings and other stories from the week in science—including an experimental drug for rectal cancer, an ancient jawbone of a polar bear, an EU ruling regarding charging ports for electronic devices, and a micrometeorite ding on the shiny mirror of the recently-launched JWST.   Some Doctors Want To Change How Race Is Used In Medicine Several months ago, a lab technologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital mixed the blood components of two people: Alphonso Harried, who needed a kidney, and Pat Holterman-Hommes, who hoped to give him one. The goal was to see whether Harried’s body would instantly see Holterman-Hommes’ organ as a major threat and attack it before surgeons could finish a transplant. To do that, the technologist mixed in fluorescent tags that would glow if Harried’s immune defense forces would latch onto the donor’s cells in preparation for an attack. If, after a few hours, the machine found lots of glowing, it meant the kidney transplant would be doomed. It stayed dark: They were a match.“I was floored,” said Harried. Both recipient and donor were a little surprised. Harried is Black. Holterman-Hommes is white. Could a white person donate a kidney to a Black person? Would race get in the way of their plans? Both families admitted those kinds of questions were flitting around in their heads, even though they know, deep down, that “it’s more about your blood type—and all of our blood is red,” as Holterman-Hommes put it. Read more at sciencefriday.com.   How A $2 Billion U.S. Plan To Save Salmon In The Northwest Is Failing CARSON, Wash.—The fish were on their way to be executed. One minute, they were swimming around a concrete pond. The next, they were being dumped onto a stainless steel table set on an incline. Hook-nosed and wide-eyed, they thrashed and thumped their way down the table toward an air-powered guillotine. Hoses hanging from steel girders flushed blood through the grated metal floor. Hatchery workers in splattered chest waders gutted globs of bright orange eggs from the dead females and dropped them into buckets, then doused them first with a stream of sperm taken from the dead males and then with an iodine disinfectant. The fertilized eggs were trucked around the corner to an incubation building where over 200 stacked plastic trays held more than a million salmon eggs. Once hatched, they would fatten and mature in rectangular concrete tanks sunk into the ground, safe from the perils of the wild, until it was time to make their journey to the ocean.   Read more at sciencefriday.com.   How A Facebook Group Helps People Identify Mysterious Mushrooms Mushroom season has begun. A wide variety of fungi are sprouting up in forests and yards, especially after a heavy rainstorm. While wild mushrooms are generally safe to touch, eating mysterious fungi is a terrible idea. But, sometimes a child or a dog gobbles up an unknown species. In order to determine if it’s poisonous or not, you’ll need an expert opinion—quickly. That’s why Kerry Woodfield helped start a Facebook group to help people correctly identify poisonous mushrooms and plants. She recruited over 200 botanists and mycologists from all over the world to volunteer their time. In the past few years, the group has mushroomed to over 130,000 members. Guest host John Dankosky talks with Woodfield, co-founder of the Facebook group, Poisons Help; Emergency Identification For Mushrooms & Plants and foraging instructor at Wild Food UK. She discusses why she decided to start the group, its role within the poison control system, and how to talk to the kids in your life about poisonous plants and mushrooms.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankosky. Ira Flato is away. This week, a round of Supreme Court decisions came and went without the one that many people have been expecting, an opinion overturning the Roe versus Wade decision of 1973. That could allow states to impose abortion bans. But even as people prepare for a changed landscape with respect to reproductive rights, a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that many Americans don't fully understand some of the areas that might be affected. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the week in science is Rachel Feltman, executive editor at Popular Science.

She's also author of a recent book on Human Sexual History, Been There, Done That. Welcome back to Science Friday, Rachel. Thanks so much for having me. Well, let's talk about this poll from Kaiser Family Foundation. It covers a lot of topics around abortion and access and attitudes toward it. But one of the things that struck me was about medication abortion. It's something that we've covered recently on the show. what it assigned? Unsurprisingly, but still very disappointingly, the poll found that a lot of adults

in the U.S. have not heard of Mitha Prestone, which is the drug that's used to induce medication abortion. Only around a quarter of U.S. adults who were polled had heard of it. And that is especially upsetting when you realize that at this point, something like more than half of the abortions that occur in the U.S. are medication abortions. And it wasn't just that people hadn't heard of this drug, but there were also a lot of misconceptions about how to access it and what it actually does. It is really, really amazing. Almost everybody we talked to when we did a story a few weeks ago about this said, I didn't know that accounted for more than half the abortions in America. Why do you think that there is this big knowledge gap, Rachel?

There are a lot of folks who just don't come across information about abortion unless they are trying to access one. And of course, you don't want any aspect of your health care to be something that you're only learning about when you are stressed and trying to figure out how to access care. And yeah, with medication abortion specifically, we saw in this poll a lot of people thinking that you can get it without a prescription, which unfortunately is not true. So again, that's something you really want people to know before they are trying to access an abortion. There are also lots of people who very clearly confuse it with emergency contraception. That's dangerous for a couple reasons. I mean, for one thing, there does seem to be this knowledge gap where because people confuse medication abortion with emergency contraception like Plan B, they think it's actually easier to access than it is. Now, in lots of states, you can access medication abortion through telemedicine, so you don't need an in-person appointment.

So it's not difficult to access, but it does take some planning. You can't just walk into a pharmacy and get it. And then on the other hand, we see in this poll a lot of folks who think that plan B and medication abortion are the same thing. And that's really dangerous when we see laws that are trying to. make abortion more difficult to access. There are people who think that plan B, which you can get at the drugstore, is capable of ending an early stage pregnancy. And it is not. It is a contraceptive method, not a way to induce abortion. And we see increasingly the same lawmakers who are trying to limit access to abortion, trying to make the line between abortion and contraception blurrier.

And we see methods like IUDs and emergency contraception being lumped in with termination. Now, this is a great example of how ignorance around reproductive health care can mean that limiting abortion can also mean limiting contraception. We're going to be following, of course, more reproductive rights stories in the weeks ahead. We're going to turn to another health story, though. News this week about a small but potentially very important study of an experimental drug for rectal cancer. or tell us about this, Rachel? Yeah. So in this new study, which was an immunotherapy trial, people with a very unresponsive colorectal

cancer cases had really stunning results. I believe it was 12 people in the trial. And of course, that is a very small group. So all of these findings come with the caveat that this is very preliminary in terms of how widely applicable the treatment could be. But the success rates they saw were still just stunning in that the drug made tumors disappear in all 12 people. And two years later, none of those tumors had reemerged and none of those patients had needed chemo radiation or surgery. And especially since colorectal cancer is on the rise in groups of young people who traditionally were thought to not really have to worry about high cancer risk.

This is really exciting. It is exciting, but a lot of caution here. This is a really, really small study. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, I think the reason it's still so exciting is that a lot of people still talk about, quote, unquote, curing cancer as if cancer is one thing. And it's important to remember that, really, it is an umbrella, and we are going to need so many types of treatments and targeted treatments to really make cancer less of a death

sentence and less of an impact on quality of life for all of the people who get all types of cancer. In other news this week, there's a milestone in climate change, but of course, not a very good one. CO2 levels are seemingly higher than ever? Again, not surprising, but still disappointing. The latest data from NOAA shows that our CO2 levels are at 421 parts per million, which is up a little less than two parts per million from last year.

and puts us at the highest CO2 levels since we started being able to record them in history. They've skyrocketed by like 50% since the late 19th century. And we now match the balmy conditions of more than 4 million years ago. It was a great time to be a giant sloth, not so great to be a human, very high sea levels. Southern Florida was completely underwater. And that was a period of CO2 level and warming that had built up very slowly. And we have managed to just zoom right into it, which is not great. It's not great indeed.

Moving on, when we talk about climate change, one of the usual poster animals is the polar bear. But there's some new research this week about the evolutionary history and relationships between bear species. This is interesting. Yeah. So what's cool about polar bears and kind of a bummer about polar bears is that since they spend so much of their time on ice flows, we actually don't have a lot of their bones to study when you try to get back in like the fossil record because they tend to end up on the bottom of the ocean. In 2004, these geologists in Svalbard found a 115,000-year-old jaw bone that has been the source of a lot of insight into ancient polar bears and their evolution. And so now we have this new really high-res DNA analysis. And it's looking specifically at brown bears versus polar bears because there's been like a lot of debate among evolutionary biologists about how closely related they are.

In fact, at times it has been argued that they're essentially the same species. So this study finally settles that debate and says, no, they're definitely very distinct. They did interbreed a lot. And actually, it was brown bears that contributed a bunch of genes to polar bears, not the other way around. Well, something that affects us all, I'm sure. You never seem to have the right charger for your widget, for your phone or your iPad or whatever. It's just like, for me, it's just a tangle of white cables in a drawer. But there's a new ruling in the European Union that might actually help us with that.

What is it? Yeah. So the EU has decreed. that all of its member countries, if they're selling electronic devices like headphones, earbuds, e-readers, and of course, phones, they need to use a USBC charging port. And that has to happen by the fall of 2024. Wow. So that could happen by the fall of 2024. Does that mean that Apple and all the other phone makers are going to change the types of phones that they're making? Like they're not going to have these weird proprietary ports anymore? Well, so that's definitely

the idea. And because the EU is such a huge chunk of the market, it's hard to imagine that Apple would sell like multiple types of phones just to have some that use USBC and some that continue to use the Lightning Port. Now, of course, lots of Apple products have already switched to USBC, but a lot of tech writers have been making the case that it's more likely that Apple is just going to switch totally to wireless charging for its phones to get around this mandate. But it will be interesting to see sort of how this actually affects the charger chaos. We've got time for one last quick story. And, you know, we're all awaiting the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the JWST. Those are supposed to come in mid-July,

but there's some news this week about the mirrors on this device. Yeah. So a few weeks ago, the JWST team, actually detected a micrometeoroid hitting one of the telescope's 18 mirror segments, which is just a piece of space debris, usually from a comet that's, you know, a tiny fraction of a meter long. And because things can pick up a huge amount of speed in the vacuum of space, even those tiny little bits of debris can really cause damage. I mean, we talk about this with the ISS all the time. They'll get little like chips in their windows and everyone freaks out,

but luckily it is built to withstand it. And of course, this space telescope is definitely prepared for these kinds of micrometeuroid collisions. So they have reported that this first impact was certainly a doozy, but just showed how well-prepared the telescope is to withstand space debris. Since we're in space, I guess I should ask you, the Mars rover this week, it's reported, has found a little friend. Yes, I love this so much. So Perseverance, the newest rover on Mars, has a pet rock and has had for about four months. There's this little rock that's on the rover's front left wheel and it has been there for 100 souls since early February. And it's gone more than 5.3 miles. It's just bouncing around. Apparently it's pretty common for rovers to pick up rocks in their wheels. But this. This one is like gunning to set a record and it's going to be very far from where it started whenever perseverance finally lets it go. Has the Pet Rockman named yet? Not to my knowledge, but that's a great question.

And NASA should definitely get on that. They did note that wherever it falls, it is going to cause a lot of confusion for future Mars geologists, which is a fun long-term prospect to think about. but for now, I'm just glad that perseverance has some company. I know, exactly. Well, thank you for bringing us this fun story and some not so fun stories, Rachel. I appreciate it. Yeah, of course. Thank you. Rachel Feldman is executive editor at Popular Science. When we come back, we'll discuss the tricky debate over how much to consider race in medical care.

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And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Doctors, scientists, and lawmakers are debating how to approach the use of race in medical care. Some of the ways it's used in medicine is based on a big assumption that bodies of different races work differently on some sort of fundamental level. Ray Ellen Bischel and Kara Anthony are reporters with Kaiser Health News who've been covering this. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thank you. Thanks for happiness. Your story. says that a patient's race shows up all over the place, like in the opening line of a doctor's notes or describing who a patient is, but also in places that are less obvious, like algorithms that are used to estimate how well your lungs or kidneys are working. So how did we get here with race being such a big part of medicine? Some of it is just outdated science, but also health care, it reflects our culture. And race is a big part of our culture and has been for a long time. Dr. Amaka Anania is a kidney doctor with Fresenius medical care, and she really traced the history of how race settled into medicine as this biological concept.

She and her colleagues say that race can be a helpful concept when used in the right way. So like how it can help identify whether certain groups of people are experiencing racism and subsequently getting different treatment. But that said, race does not tell you how somebody's body works on a fundamental level. Here's Dr. Ananya. History is being written right now that this is not the right thing to do and that the path forward is to use race responsibly and not to do it in the way that we've been doing in the past. Researchers have found that race gets confused with biology in all sorts of specialties, from bones to hearts to lungs.

And for more than a year, we've been looking into kidney disease. So why are you focusing on kidney disease? Well, there are a ton of equations in this specialty that involve race. They're called race adjustments or corrections sometimes. And people in this field have been talking a lot about them lately. Just to give you one example, one equation that really stuck out to us, it tries to estimate how long transplanted kidneys would last. So basically ask the question, how good are these kidneys going to be?

And the equation downgrades kidneys coming from a black person, as if being black was a condition. And on top of that, as if it was a condition more dangerous than diabetes. So one person who says this kind of thinking makes absolutely no sense is Dr. Vanessa Grubbs, and she's a kidney doctor with the University of California, San Francisco. If you had two harvested kidneys, one from a black person, one from a white person just laying on a table, you would see no difference. And there is no gene that you can test for race. There just simply is not. Grubbs is one of many doctors who's been really vocal about this issue. and there's a really important reason for that.

There are stark racial disparities like how black Americans are more than twice as likely than white Americans to have their kidneys fail badly enough that they need a transplant. But black people are also less likely to get a transplant, especially from a living donor, which is really considered best for survival. So there's a nuanced distinction here,

but the message that experts in the field really want to get out is that racial disparities in health do not reflect differences in biology. So what they can reflect is a group of people's exposure to racism or a group of people's generational lack of access to stable housing, nutritious food, which can have this domino effect on health. What they're saying is that you wouldn't look at gender pay gaps and assume one gender is fundamentally more capable of hard work. Rather, those show you more who tends to get the opportunities. So let's talk about why this misperception that race equals biology is a problem.

Can that misperception actually harm patients? Well, for some people, it can delay them getting the right treatment or getting the right diagnosis. That matters because kidney disease can really affect your life. Until they can get a transplant, a lot of people have to spend hours each week doing dialysis. And typically that means going to a dialysis center to get your blood cleaned. It can take hours each time and you do it multiple times a week. All of that can make it really hard to work a regular schedule. It can affect energy levels. It can limit your ability to travel. COVID made it pretty scary, too. So this is a condition that can really define what a person can do. Now, in our story, we focused on one case to just figure out where race came up. Yeah, the patient we followed, his name is Alfonso Herod. He's from St. Louis and found out that he had kidney disease about five years ago and needed a transplant. Amazingly, his former boss, her name is Pat Hulterman Homis. She wanted to be a

donate one of her kidneys. We followed along to figure out where race came up in their case. Alfonso is black and Pat is white. I called Alfonso the day that he found out that Pat was a match. Hey, Carol, how you doing? I heard it's a good day for you. It's a phenomenal day. When Alfonso heard the news, he purchased a thank you gift for Pat, fresh flowers for the person who would give him a fresh start in life, except he left them laying around. His wife, Natasha, said she found them first. I walked in and I saw the flowers on the counter and I said, oh, this is nice.

I said, who are these for? You know, trying to be coy. And he said, those are for pet. I said, oh, they're not for me. He said, no, you didn't give me a kidney. Pet did finally get those flowers when she saw Alfonso and his wife in person. Pulling up, you're like, they're here. I know. I was so excited. I haven't seen Al except on Zoom for a couple of years. So it's great to see them.

Race was on their minds when they sat down to talk about the surgery. I wondered if our racial difference, the fact that Alice Black and I'm White, would be a barrier. Natasha wondered too. I did. I looked it up to see with her not being a family member and then being of a different race if that would have an impact. Race comes up a lot in life, way beyond health care. On job applications, in school, when you apply for a loan, Alfonso says when he sees that race box that he's supposed to check, he's not always sure why it's there, and it irks him.

If I'm trying to get treatment for kidney failure, why doesn't matter whether I'm black or white, you know, or Hispanic, you know? He wouldn't mind sharing that information if he understood why doctors were asking about his race. But that's never explained, you know, so I leave it blank sometimes. when I feel rebellious. Alfonso wants his doctors to see more than his race. I serve as a big brother. I serve as a little brother.

I serve as a listener and sometimes as a talker. And now when he's talking with his doctors, he isn't afraid to ask about race. Just keep your eyes open, ask questions, and inquire, you know, just inquire about things. And John, I actually tried that myself. I'm a black woman. and I brought up race and kidney disease testing with my own doctor.

Because in our reporting, we heard that it can be really useful for patients to do just that, to ask how race is being used in their care. My doctor was a little surprised, but we ended up having a really good conversation, and that appointment changed the way we talked to each other. Hmm. It's interesting. I'm glad that you were able to have that conversation. Let's get back to Alfonso and Pat.

So where did race show up in their case as they were on the way to this kidney transplant? Well, one place that really stood out to us was this info packet that the hospital gave to Pat when she was just starting out trying to qualify as a donor. And this packet said people with high blood pressure who are black can't donate. But it also said people with high blood pressure who are white could potentially donate with extra testing. What we've learned is that that kind of race-based distinction is just not scientifically sound. It's kind of like if you said, okay, people of a certain religion with high blood pressure can't. donate, but people with this other religion could. And all of this is important because getting a transplant from a living donor, as Kara said, give someone the best chance of surviving. And using

race without a biological basis as a reason to exclude donors could decrease the pool of people that are available to donate a living organ. If you take this one step further, that's a problem because as long as race is used as a stand-in for someone's ancestry or genetics, then the line between protecting and excluding certain groups will be fuzzy. So what do experts say about how race should actually be used in medicine? Yeah, we talked to Dr. Lisa McElroy, who is a surgeon at Duke University who performs kidney transplants there. This is how she thinks about race in her practice. When I see a black patient in clinic, I don't ignore the fact that they're black. I might spend a little bit extra time in the room emphasizing the importance of living donations.

Just like how she might spend more time with a Spanish-speaking patient, making sure they know how to access a translator. And she says the goal here is not to ignore the social determinants of health like race. It's to help patients overcome the obstacles that can keep them from getting good care. But before I let you go, I have to ask, how are Pat and Al doing? They're both doing great. I checked in with them all the time, and the road to recovery has been really smooth for both of them. That's really good to hear. I want to thank you both for bringing us this story.

Kara Anthony and Ray Ellen Bichel are reporters with Kaiser Health News. Thank you both so much. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. And if you want to read their full story on this topic, you can head to our website. It's science friday.com slash race in medicine. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And now it's time to check in on the state of science.

This is KERNNNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. local science stories of national significance. Over the past two decades, the federal government has funneled over $2 billion into salmon hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest. And although hatcheries in this region have been around for over two centuries, they've never really been able to replenish the wild salmon population, as they were originally designed to do. Despite more salmon being released into the Pacific Ocean than ever, fewer salmon are surviving. And

This has had a profound impact on native tribes who live along the Columbia River. They were promised access to fishing on their ancestral lands and now rely upon the troubled hatchery system. This is the focus of an investigation by ProPublica's local reporting network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Joining me now to talk about their reporting is Tony Schick, investigative and data reporter with Oregon Public Broadcasting's Science and Environmental Unit, and Irina Huang, data reporter for ProPublica based in Atlanta.

Tony and Irina, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for being here. Hey, thank you so much for having us. It's great to be here. So Tony, I'll start with you and just ask how exactly we got here. When and why were salmon hatcheries developed in the Pacific Northwest to start with? The hatchery idea started back in the late 1800s when salmon were first getting depleted. Spencer Baird, who was a fisheries,

scientists and kind of the founder of NOAA fisheries as it is today had this idea that well we could hatch fish in huge numbers and release them into the rivers and that would kind of bypass our need to limit our fishing or regulated in any way. The early hatcheries didn't really have any evidence that they were successful in that and then the idea of hatcheries kind of faded away in the Depression era and then after World War II when it was time to industrialize the Columbia River and the Snake River system, then proponents of that needed some way to offset the damage to salmon runs. And hatcheries were the only idea that they had or the only solution they had. Then that is when the proliferation of hatcheries really

started. That system is largely in place today. Irene, you combed through hundreds of public records from these salmon hatcheries. Explain to us how big this problem is how many salmon released into the ocean actually survive. So to get to that answer, first, I just want to establish that there's tons of information out there. Hatcheries and federal agencies are employing highly trained fish biologists who put out these reports and management plans that are like tens or even hundreds of pages long. Using that data, we did an analysis. We reported trends in survival over the past decade or so. And because salmon runs can vary significantly from year to year, the number of adult salmon that are migrating back, we wanted to see how good hatchery salmon survival has been,

but also how bad it's been. And we found that in the best case, only two out of eight vulnerable populations in the Columbia River Basin exceeded a 4% survival rate. And that's a rate that a federal agency in the 2000s established as necessary for a population to recover. And in contrast, though, the most recent years of complete data for fish release between 2014 to 2018 show that none of the populations exceeded the 8% survival. One was really dismal. It was as low as 0.5%. And I also just want to add that this is consistent with federal estimates. As of 2020, all hatcheries in the Columbia River Basin area were producing nearly 150 million juvenile fish, but they were seeing only about 1.5 million return to freshwater. And, you know, that 1.5 million, that's about a 1% return rate.

that's been estimated to be less than 10% of historical runs. Estimates are that in the mid-1800s, there were anywhere between 5 to 16 million adult salmon coming back, and we are clearly nowhere near that. That is a big change. So what do we know about why so few salmon are returning? I mean, what is it about salmon who started their life in hatcheries that makes them less likely to survive?

You know, like any conversation with a bunch of scientists, I think it boils down to it depends. But there was a fair bit of consensus in this case. The problem, though, is that the ocean is where most attrition happens. And it turns out that we really can't know a whole lot about what exactly happens to fish in the ocean. And it's not only that. One Noah scientist told me, quote, the ocean's been pretty weird, end quote. In recent years, there's something called the blob.

That's like capital T, capital B that scientists have been keeping an eye on. It's a massive warm water. It's linked to changes in the climate and ocean ecosystem. Marine heat waves have been occurring more frequently. and it is known that warm waters are bad for certain species of salmon. And so, yeah, it's really complicated, but there are some clues. I came across a 2016 paper that showed that the hatchery environment, you know, this artificial environment we've created, is really shaping salmon at a genetic level.

Crowding them into tanks means that hatchery salmon genes are changing. Certain genes like those involved in wound repair, immunity and metabolism are actually more active. But these genes aren't necessarily the traits that wild salmon need to survive. in a changing environment. Tony, another factor that we mentioned at the top is that there are many indigenous people who live along the Columbia River whose culture and livelihoods depend on these salmon hatcheries. What can you tell us about this and how these indigenous communities came to be so involved in the salmon hatchery business?

It wasn't always that way. In fact, the early efforts at hatcheries, tribes were largely shut out of that, even though they have, you know, dependent on salmon and coexisted with some. salmon for thousands of years, and it wasn't until tribes fought through legal battles to establish their role as co-managers of the river and started getting federal funding to run their own hatcheries, that they started to take a more active role in these hatcheries and have used these hatcheries as a way to try and rebuild some of these runs. The tribes see this as kind of their only tool for putting fish back in the rivers.

But that's what makes this so complicated, of course, is it may be their only tool, but it's a tool that it seems isn't working in your research. Is there any way to fix this? That is what makes it this kind of conundrum. And there are indications that this can be done better. And in fact, tribes have been at the forefront of pushing for that. They've been rearing fish in different ways to try and preserve more. of that wildness. Instead of, you know, concrete pens, they will use ponds, more natural environments

to try and acclimate these fish to the rivers. Even these better ways of rearing fish are not a panacea. The complicating factors harming wildfish need to be addressed if you're going to recover salmon populations. It's quite a piece of reporting and a very important story for the region. I'd like to thank Tony Schick, investigative and data reporter in Oregon Public Broadcasting's science and environmental unit. And Irene Huang, a data reporter for ProPublica based in Atlanta. Thank you both so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. And if you'd like to read Tony and Irene's full story, go to science Friday.com slash salmon. We have to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll be talking with an organizer of an

international group of experts dedicated to identifying poisonous plants and mushrooms. And stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. Mushroom season is upon us. All different types of fungi are sprouting up in the woods, or maybe even in your yard after a heavy rainstorm. Mushrooms are cool to look at, of course, and generally okay to touch. The trouble comes if, say, a little kid or a dog eats one. How do you know if it's poisonous? Well, you'll want an expert opinion, and you'll want that opinion pretty fast.

My next guest started a Facebook group to do just that, including poisonous plants, too. She recruited more than 200 botanists and mycologists from all over the world to volunteer their time, and the group is mushroomed in the past several years. It now has over 130,000 members. Joining me is Kerry Woodfield, co-founder of the Facebook group Poisons Help, Emergency Identification for Mushrooms and Plants. Carrie is also a foraging instructor at Wild Food, UK, based in Hereford, England. Carrie, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for being here. Hello, thanks for having me. So there are a lot of plant foraging and identification groups online. Why did you decide to create one that's specifically for identifying poisonous plants and mushrooms? I think it was we identified that there was a need for this kind of thing.

We noticed that I say we, myself, the other co-founder and a lot of the other people that I'd come to know through the foraging groups, we noticed that people were turning to Facebook for an identification and just sort of posting on lots of groups when say little Timmy or little Fido had eaten a mushroom or a plant and you don't necessarily want to take a big trip down to the A&E we call it. You would call it the ER. So they were, you know, trying to ascertain what this was. And by this point we had all kind of made a bit of a name for ourselves as good at it, being able to identify things. So we'd be tagged into these kinds of posts. And sometimes I wouldn't be able to identify something. So I'd tag in other people who I thought might be able to help as well.

And eventually we kind of realized we were all doing this anyway. So we might as well formalize it in a way that meant that the whole world ended up being covered by someone who is going to be a wake and know what it was at the time that it was needed. Most of them were going to be not harmful at all, but in the cases where it's ones that are poisonous and in the deadly range, you really need a quick identification to have the best outcome. And so we decided after one of the particular cases, which involved tagging quite a lot of people, it was a very difficult case, involving an autistic non-verbal five-year-old. And we realized that we were also worried about maybe going to sleep or going to work or driving or being without Wi-Fi,

that the only way to sort of go forward was either to step back and not do it at all or to find a way to make it more cohesive. Could you tell us more about this case that kind of got everything started, this case of a five-year-old autistic child who had ingested something? Yes. So it was in Britain. I think it might have actually been a Scottish school that the school had photographed it and told the mum that their child had eaten this. He wasn't able to communicate how much or anything, but it was clearly in bits.

And it was part of the Quartanarius genus, which has over 600 species. And so we were sort of all big. tagged in by concerned people who knew that we were quite good at the identification and realized that it might be beyond, say, my scope, but not someone else's. We got the answer. Eventually, it turned out to be a non-toxic member of the genus. But after sort of talking it through with my then housemate, we kind of, we were talking about how we were getting a lot of these tags and, hey, wouldn't it be a good idea if we set up. some kind of place that everything could go to at the same time and was only staffed then by

people who really knew what they were talking about because another problem on Facebook groups is everyone has an opinion and that opinion may not always be something that's appropriate in that particular situation. You want when it's your child or your health or your pets' health or a loved one, when it's their health on the line, you want to know that you can trust the answer. So if your dog or your child eats a plant or a mushroom, and maybe you're concerned, most people's first instinct is, of course, to call local poison control. So I guess I'll ask you, I assume that the thing to do is to call poison control first, right? Not to go on the Facebook group. Actually, it depends. But if it's as something as dangerous as a dandelion,

line leaf or a lettuce leaf, that's something that you don't necessarily need to do. Whereas calling poison control, what's happening now is actually they're referring people to us anyway, or they themselves that the people in poison control are posting with what they're receiving. And to be honest, a few of our identifiers are poison control too. We've selected scientists and people who really do know what they're talking about. Also, if it's a really dangerous one, you've got a small window of time to act. So you want to get that information to them as soon as possible. This isn't to replace the systems already in place. This isn't to sort of undermine or take away from poison control or the amazing work that medical professionals do. This is

actually to help them as well. We're very, very fast. Our record's like under a minute, but you'll definitely be seen in under five. So by the time you've managed to tie your shoelaces and put your toddler in the car, you've got the answer as to whether or not you're driving down to the emergency room with the identification to give them or whether or not you're going to the ice cream shop to fill them up on ice cream. They're really hungry. And ice cream is our patented method for our non-toxic prescription. If you've eaten something non-toxic, I think it was Patrick Bjork, our Swedish mycologist and botanist, who he's quite famous for stepping in and calming down terrified parents with this rather

lovely little prescriptions for ice cream. And then maybe a glass of wine for mom and dad, because you've heard a scare. It sounds like those are some pretty safe prescriptions to give. I want to ask about this group of experts that you've recruited from all over the world. They're volunteers. Who are these people and how did you recruit them to be part of this group? So in any community, you start to become familiar with who's good at something and, you know, strengths and weaknesses. So we started to all recognize each other's talents and abilities. And so that sort of founded the core people and then asking them, who do you know that I don't?

That would also be good. We've got a lot of big names behind us. it's really, I don't know why they decided to work for me. Like, I don't know anything in comparison to these people. These are people who they've been working for sometimes decades in the industry as lecturers and mycologists and botanists and researchers in their spare time. They're like, yeah, okay, then this isn't something that we're paid to do. So they sort of dip in and out when they can.

These are people who are giving their time and they've got day jobs wherever they work. You can't have just anybody asking questions around the clock. You have very specific rules about who can post and what sorts of questions actually go to this esteemed group. If it's a casual question that doesn't have the emergency criteria with mushrooms being ingested or with plants being touched or ingested, then just put it on one of the other groups that we run. and you'll get seen. You'll get the answer. But when it is an emergency, this is, we get that internal alert system, which pulls us all in to have a look at it, or whoever's awake and able, obviously, but we drop everything for some of these cases. I've pulled over on the side of the road. I've handed my breastfeeding baby to my partner and ran out to the car with my books in order to

deal with a case because, you know, we do prioritise it. And the reason that we're so strict about asking about where in the world we are, and if I were to say, oh, this is in HR2, that's not going to mean anything to your listeners because that's specific to Britain, whereas state abbreviations that a lot of USA, people in the USA are familiar with, don't mean anything to say myself or people in Australia or the Philippines. So we need people to say exactly where they are and like spell it out because that way we can alert the relevant people. Exactly. Well, and luckily, most of the cases that you get calls for are not life-threatening. But every once in a while, a correct identification really is a matter of life and death.

Can you tell us about how you were able to save the life of a boy in Pakistan who ate a mysterious berry. Oh, that was a, that was a really horrible case. The group was fairly new at that point and we got contacted by someone from a hospital saying three boys have eaten this berry. Two of them were already dead, the eight-year-old and the 10-year-old, I think, and it was the 12, 13-year-old who was unconscious. And I actually, I don't know Pakistani flora, but one of the gifts maybe of the ADHD autistic brain is being able to recognize like internal patterns. And normally we don't, so Google on a hunch, but normally we've got someone who can idea it without, who actually knows it. But in this particular case, we didn't. We were a very new group.

And I googled Pakistan Red Berry and scrolled to about six Google pages before I came across this one called Masuri Berry. I found the scientific name, put that in, and pulled up all of the same pictures, which allowed me to confirm and then found out, yes, this is horrendous toxin. So pass that back to the hospital. And once that's done, once the identity's done,

that's my job done. Obviously, we like a follow-up, but we don't harangue anyone for it. And it actually took someone being a little nosy about a year later asking what happened and he said, yeah, that the boy did live. Usually if people have pulled through there, they're very quick to tell us and, you know, that obviously you can understand that that will stay with me forever. But it's amazing that you're able to to do what you did. And amazing that you're able to find some of this information. Just

knowing a bit about how this works. You're an expert in this field, but not even necessarily knowing all the berries in Pakistan, you're able to do a search in a much more efficient way than someone else would. I guess I should ask, though, so many people because of the internet, because of Google, and because of all these plant applications that you can get on your phone, probably a whole lot of people think they know more than they do, right? They can look up red berries in Pakistan pretty easily as well. What's the difference between you and the people in your group and someone with a smartphone and a plant idea? app? That's a very good question. And a lot of it, I think, comes down to knowing what you know,

but importantly, knowing what you don't know. And there's a lot of drive to feel that you're good at something, the best at something. And I think that's part of the reason the people that we recruited were recruited was because they knew their limits and they knew when they were able to do something and able to say, I don't know this one. but I know who might. Obviously, we recruit people with a track record, a proven history of getting things right. The epidemic of app users at the moment is quite worrying because they're just not accurate enough yet. Some of us did a test and we worked out at something like 30% accuracy,

but I've certainly had deadly hemlock identified as an edible. and one of our people, her son's hair was identified as a gourmet mushroom. And we run on a consensus as well. So we need at least three people to agree with that consensus. That way, if one of us is having a bad day and gets it wrong, which does happen, we're all human. It doesn't matter because we've got all the other people able to say, no, actually, that's incorrect because of X, Y and Z.

I'm talking with Carrie Woodford, co-founder of a Facebook group that helps to identify poisonous plants and mushrooms. I'm John Dankosky, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Well, obviously, you and your group are there to help, but you'd love it if you didn't get so many calls from around the world. What sort of tips do you have for people who are spending time outside with their kids and with their dogs? Things that they might just need to know in order to help identify things in advance, or to just make sure that they're safe and they're not having to call you. In terms of staying safe, obviously most of our cases are going to be toddlers and puppies. So knowing that they're sort of the wild card, as it were, the uncontrolled aspect of it.

But they're fast. And, you know, I'm certainly not faster than my toddler half the time. So it's a mixture of supervision, teaching them as a. early on to only eat things that have been cooked and that you can name. So that way, you know, they bring it to you to identify. Making it a game rather than run away and like or lie about what they've done, they're able to share with you like that they're interested in this thing and then you can talk about it. And mushrooms and plants, they don't have legs. They won't chase you. So in terms of with mushrooms particularly, you have to actually put them into your, your

stomach for them to pose a problem. With plants, they can be a bit more dangerous. We've all been stung by a nettle or I think poison ivy is a big problem in the States. Certainly the dangerous ones are worth learning, but also try not think about it as a way of sanitising nature. These things are doing their job, they've got a purpose and a life of their own. There was this wonderful poem I read about this man whose toddler had gotten stung by a nettle. And so he burned and he hacked and he dug up. And then the next week they were up again. And actually the lesson there is like teach and learn about how to avoid the harm

rather than trying to eliminate the harm because the world is not going to be sanitised so easily. You know, we teach our children how to cross the road look left and right. You know, you don't sanitise everything. you learn and adapt how to deal with the world. Yeah. That's, I think, a good place to end. Carrie Woodfield is co-founder of the Facebook group, Poisons Help, Emergency Identification for Mushrooms and Plants.

Carrie is also a forging instructor at Wild Food, UK, based in Hereford, England. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks so much for having me. This has been really exciting. Now, here's Emma Gomez with some of the folks who helped to make this show possible. Our radio producers are Christy Taylor, Kathleen Davis, Shoshana Bucksbaum, and Rasha Aridi. Diana Montana is our experiences manager.

Nahima Ahmed is our manager of impact strategy. Ariel Zich is our director of audience. And I'm digital producer Emma Gomez. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much, Emma. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of the show or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts.

Or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You can also email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFriad.com. I'm John Dankowski. Ira's back next week, and he'll be taking some of your questions live in the studio. Have a great weekend.