Posted on 05/22/2024 1:09:02 PM PDT by Red Badger
How far would you go to avoid a rash from a common pest on hikes?
Well, one reporter for The Wall Street Journal has gone as far as to blend poison oak into smoothies and mix them into his salad bowl — all in a bid to develop an immunity towards the chemical irritants found in the plant's leaves.
Jeff Horwitz, who usually reports on technology, wrote about his slightly mad mission for a feature article in the Saturday newspaper.
"I started eating poison oak in January, when the first buds began to swell on the hazardous plant’s bare stems," he wrote, explaining that he was sick of getting poison oak rashes during mushroom foraging trips in California.
And surprisingly, despite some stern written warnings he came across during his research, Horwitz's newfound habit of eating poison oak seems to have built up a resistance to the shrub and its plant resin urushiol, also found in poison ivy and sumac, and which causes the rash.
After ingesting an increasing amount of poison oak leaves in his smoothies and salads — the "taste of young poison oak is surprisingly mild, grassy and only a little bit tart," he notes — he didn't get any signs in his body that it was stressed out from the experiment, except for red rashes here and there. He also experienced an itchy butt — presumably from pooping out the remnants.
At the end of his experiment, Horwitz says he could rub a poison oak leaf on his skin and not experience any rash breakouts.
"My poison-oak salad days are over, but I do intend to nibble a few leaves here and there when hiking around the Bay Area in an effort to maintain my resistance on a permanent basis," he wrote.
Horwitz got his idea from reading about how California's indigenous tribes would make tea from poison oak roots and eat the leaves to develop immunity. He also read online forums where outdoors enthusiasts discussed noshing on poison ivy or poison oak helped them develop a resistance, though much of literature he consulted warned not to eat the plants.
In the first half of the 20th Century, pharmaceutical companies capitalized on this folk remedy and sold to the public poison ivy pills and shots in order to prevent spring and summertime rashes, according to Horwitz. But for unknown reasons, Big Pharma stopped making these urushiol extract medicines, making the larger public forget there's a preventative treatment for the rash beyond a good shower, antihistamine pills or hydrocortisone cream.
But before you reach for your blender or visit Erewhon and ask them to drop a couple of poison oak leaves into your smoothie order, Horwitz reports that pharmacologist Mahmoud ElSohly, who has been working with medical startup Hapten Sciences, has developed a new urushiol drug that would prevent poison ivy or poison oak rashes.
The medication could be available to the public as soon as 2026.
Worst I ever get is a little pinkness and itch that’s usually gone the next day. I’m still careful about touching the stuff, though.
When my brothers were little, about maybe 7 and 8, they were bragging to their friends about being immune to poison oak, and rubbed it all over themselves to prove it. To this day, all you have to do is call them up and whisper, “Poison oak,” into the phone and they’ll break out like anything.
Last time I got poison ivy I needed steroid injections. Looked like bad second degree burns on my arms. So it can be far worse than a rash.
I’ve never had poison ivy or oak. I used to rub it all over when dared by friends as a child. Adults would yell at me not to do that and said my immunity could disappear ar any time. In fact, just today I loaded with my bare hands a bunch of poison oak onto a truck. If I catch it I will update this post.
Another way to handle it is to wash with mechanic's hand cleaner, the semi-liquid stuff that usually comes in a pump bottle. Again intended to remove oil, and somewhat better than DAWN for this.
There are two kinds, the slimey kind and the gritty kind. The gritty one works better for me.
50 plus years ago when my DH and started dating he was highly allergic to PI. I was not. Now he is not and I am. We both are very careful. We get rid of it wherever we see it on our farm.
Next try antifreeze...
You win the thread.
That’s where Dude Wipes come in.
He developed immunity to Poison Oak.
But they say there is a medicine coming out that will do the same thing.
Actually urushiol is an extremely powerful immune modulator. The rash is the manifestation of a delated T cell reaction. Its a veritable immunological firestorm. Urushiol when combined with tumor antigens has been considered as potential, anti cancer immunotherapy as a cutaneous vaccine. Probably not a good idea to desensitize your immune system to urushiol.
Exactly! If the headline says, “Find out what happened next,” I read that as “Skip this article.” 😄
:-)
I just knew it!
I’m sure it was Cherokee :- )
Nope. Not doing that.
One way to develop resistance to poison oak is to get stung by poison ivy at the age of 4 or 5.
We had one knucklehead in our Regiment whose attention-gainer was biting the heads off of lizards. He loved the attention he got, so he upped his game: he caught a Mojave Green Rattlesnake and in front of all his startled buddies, started to bite the head off the snake, While the rattler was being chewed, the rattler chewed this ignorant fool's tongue and inside of his mouth.
He quickly realized that this might not have been his greatest idea and threw the snake away - but his throat was swelling shut rapidly and as soon as his leadership was alerted, a helicopter medevac took him to Yucca Valley hospital.
He very nearly died, because the hospital staff was so occupied with laughing that anybody could be that dumb, that they nearly didn't get the antivenin in him in time.
He recovered and was promptly discharged but before he left the Marine Corps, he was required to speak before every battalion in the Division about how stupid he was.
We had a farm and when I was walking through a field, I brushed up against poison ivy. I had never had a reaction to it but this time I got the oh-so-itchy rash with the liquid filled blisters around one of my ankles. For six months I agonized with the worst bleeding itch I have ever had and finally I sat on the edge of the bathtub and took a handful of sugar and rubbed it against the blisters on my ankle until they bled. I rinsed off, slathered on petroleum jelly and put on socks. Other than the broken skin that had to heal (very minimal) the liquid filled blisters and the rash were gone!!!!
I heard of people who burned poison ivy and inhaled the smoke, leading to severe health issues. I would be very wary of doing the smoothie unless I was at the hospital with an epipen at the ready.
Next he is going to eat bullets to become bullet proof.
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