China
Africa
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Roots and Tubers
Published in Christopher Cumo, Ancestral Diets and Nutrition, 2020
Cyanide poses the greatest dangers when famine threatens from drought. Tolerating aridity better than other crops, cassava may be the only edible to survive, leaving people little else to eat. Yet aridity lowers cassava’s water content, concentrating cyanide in roots and other tissues. Insufficient food from poor harvests and cyanide from potent cassava combine to damage the brain, partially paralyzing victims. The disease, known as konzo, usually cripples the legs. Konzo may also impair speech and vision.
Cyanogenic Glycosides
Published in Dongyou Liu, Handbook of Foodborne Diseases, 2018
Consumption of improperly processed cassava may create chronic/subacute dietary cyanide exposure that leads to tropical ataxic neuropathy (a chronic condition in elderly persons showing optic atrophy and inability to coordinate muscle movements) and paralytic disorder (Konzo, an irreversible paralysis of the legs), particularly in individuals with low blood concentrations of sulfur amino acids (available sulfur is used for rhodanese-based cyanide detoxification) and elevated levels of plasma thiocyanate. Additionally, goiter and cretinism may be aggravated by cyanide from cassava, especially in areas of endemic iodine deficiency, as thiocyanate (a metabolite of ingested cyanide) is similar in size to iodine molecule and competes for iodine uptake [3].
Dr Gordon Plant’s Festschrift Tidings
Published in Neuro-Ophthalmology, 2022
Sui H. Wong, Susan Mollan, Simon J Hickman, Stephen Madill, Luke Bennetto, Sarah Cooper
In his introduction to Professor Thorkild Tylleskär’s talk, Dr Plant recalled the sunny day in London when he first heard of the work on konzo, a neurotoxic disorder found in parts of Africa. Professor Tylleskär, alongside Hans Rosling and other collaborators, determined that inadequately processed cassava (leading to cyanide toxicity) was the cause of konzo. Konzo causes abrupt and permanent neurodisability of an upper motor neuron type. This disorder remains particularly important as approximately 600 million individuals rely on cassava as a staple of their diet. It became clear to Professor Tylleskär that some of those affected by konzo developed visual symptoms and signs and Dr Plant was enlisted to examine these cases further. This problem was shown to be an independent optic neuropathy, similar to that observed in epidemic proportions in Cuba and amongst British prisoners of war in the Second World War. Many questions followed in the discussion after the session.