In article , "madgardener" wrote:
they ARE a member of the Euphorbia family. Ingesting the leaves cause
nausea, vomiting and some hallucinations. The meeting at Lowes with the
plant people basically said it would take about 500 leaves to seriously
injure an average weight child. That's some serious grazing. Same thing with
pets. They KNOW what not to eat unlike nibbling children.............A child
will nibble something because it's pretty or colorful. Animals have those
sophisticated senses of smell. And since it has an expurgative effect, you'd
have some colorful ralph to clean up. By the way, the common houseplant,
philodendrum is poisonous.......and the potato, when allowed to get too
green from sunlight can really make you sick as potato's are from the
belladonna family. I've never had a problem with anything eating the shoots
of potato's that grew out of my compost pile and I peel my taters deeply to
get past the green if they get too much sunlight before I can cook them all.
madgardener
"Rebecca Lovelace" wrote in message
om...
People put poisonous plants in their compost piles all the time, they
just
don't realize it.
Oh, like potato fruit? 
Thanks, all. I don't usually have pointsettias so I wasn't sure how
toxic they were, only that you need to be careful if you have
plant-eating pets.
Rebecca
Poinsettas are harmless to pets & people.
This has been a fascinating series of posts, because uniformly incorrect,
showing how deeply ingrained is the myth of poinsettia toxicity. But to
quote Keith L. Smith of the Ohio State University Agricultural Extension:
"Various reports over the years have led the general public to believe
poinsettias are toxic to humans; however, this has not been authenticated.
Research conducted at The Ohio State University & other institutions has
proved the old wives' tale that poinsettias are poisonous to be false."
Yet it is a deeply ingrained myth that poinsettias are toxic. It is so
ingrained that it gets tossed onto dozens of "poisonous plants lists" with
no one bothering to check to find out if there is actually any toxic
alkaloid in this plant, & even veterinarians will state with straight
faces that poinsettias will kill cats or dogs, though no veterinarian on
earth has ever seen this happen because it can't happen. The mature plant
exudes a white milk similar to that of toxic euphorbias, which would tend
to increase the belief in this myth once it got started, but there is not
one case on record of poinsettias injuring pets, & people, but the caustic
level is about the same as that of a dandylion.
The currently prevailing theory is that the myth began in Hawaii in 1919,
when a two year old child was found dead under a full
grown poinsettia tree, with a poinsettia leaf in her hand. This is the
ONLY death-by-poinsettia ever reported, & it was a 100% false report. A
Cornell University professor in 1972 attempted long after the case to
track down the specifics, knowing as he did that poinsettias are nontoxic.
The last living witness to the case said there had never been poinsettias
involved in the only known case of poinsettia poisoning; that he didn't
know how the story got started since poinsettias were not involved [see
details in THE MEXICAN PET].
In close to a century since, the one additional case of moderate illness
has been reported, but it was not medically tested at the time, & could've
been anything, but the parent presenting a child with stomach upset had
seen the child eat a poinsettia leaf. This was the much-cited case was in
Rochester, NY, in 1965, but the child did not need to be treated for
anything whatsoever.
The urban folktale itself causes headaches for florists & poinsettia
ranchers, as nothing squelches the belief. The Paul Ecke Poinsettia Ranch
strives every winter to undue this unkillable myth, to the point that
market manager Thom David grabs a few bracts & eats them right in front of
anyone who persists in the belief, & that always settles the matter, so
perhaps he should do this on Fear Factor, as nothing less would reach
enough people to have any chance of turning the widespread belief around.
Harrassed by superstitious activists who wanted the government to force
the poinsettia industry to put toxic warning labels on poinsettias, the
Consumer Products Safety Commission accumulated all relevant literature, &
in 1975 denied the petition, issuing instead a clean bill of health for
the complete safety of poinsettias, citing the complete lack of any
evidence to the contrary. Yet a Bruskin/Goldring Research poll of 1,000
Americans found that 50% were certain poinsettias were poisonous, 34%
didn't know, & only 16% were well informed. They found that women were
more prone to believing the myth than men; & anyone under the age of 50
was more apt to believe it than anyone aged 50 or older (so we DO get
wiser as we age!); & people in the Northeast were more prone to believing
the myth than were people in the West.
Many otherwise harmless plant alkaloids in sufficient concentration can
cause vomiting, for which reason the American Medicical Association's
poison handbook still states that poinsettias might cause stomach upset or
vomiting, though otherwise harmless. The AMA is being overcautious even at
that, since stomach upset & vomiting can be induced by a cheap meal at
Taco Time. A study by the Academic Faculty of Entomology at Ohio State
University measured effects of ingesting large amounts of the plant & were
unable to reach a toxic level. Using rat models, a diet of poinsettia
leaves had no adverse effects, a zero mortality rate, zero symptoms of
toxicity, no changes in behavior, & they were fed serially each part of
the poinsettia to find out if any part of it was even mildly toxic. So far
as the rats were concerned, the poinsettia is completely edible raw,
though for a human to eat them one would need to be awfully desparate, as
the bitter taste is extremely horrible. They established that if a 50
pound dog or child could eat the equivalent of between 500 & 600 of the
bracts, or a pound & a half of the sap, they would still not have reached
a toxic dosage. In essence they found it to be completely.
The Ohio research has been duplicated by other institutes because of the
persistance of the belief, & the results are always the same. A study by
the Childrenšs Hospital in Pittsburgh & Carnegie Mellon University found
that out of 22,793 poinsettia exposures in the American Association of
Poison Control Centers database, not one case of toxicity was present. In
1996, Dr. Edward Krenzelok, director of Pittsburgh Poison Center,
analyzed data on 850,000 poinsettia exposure reports in the database of
the American Association of Poison Countrol Centers, finding not one case
of authentic poisoning. It is extremely hard for children to successfully
swallow the leaves because they taste so damned bad, but in that enormous
database were 92 cases involving children injesting quantities of
poinsettias, inducing very worried parents to contact poison centers. NOT
ONE of these cases resulted in any harmful effects.
My own suspicion is the myth originally transferred from Christmas
mistletoe (mildly toxic) & English holly (much more toxic), which are
properly
worried about.
-paghat the ratgirl
PS: There ARE toxic euophorbias, & as point of fact even those will
compost safely.
--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl:
http://www.paghat.com/