All plants and trees produce cyanide.

Cyanide is a major defense mechanism for plants and trees.

Cyanide is utilized with other chemicals by plants to produce hydrogen cyanide which is emitted into the air to ward off insects and other creatures nibbling or grazing on them.

The smell of freshly cut grass is actually a potent poison secreted by the grass to ward off any attack.

This is why herbivores in the wild graze downstream. When Buffalos graze on grass, the grass being eating spews out a potent mix of hydrogen cynanide which then triggers other niegbouring grass plants to spew more hydrogen cynanide preventing the buffalo to graze further.

It so happens that the hybrid grass expected to be imported by the Buhari administration can produce toxic amounts of hydrogen cynanide if the weather condition permits say on a very hot day.

So the plan to import hybrid grass from Brazil to be transplanted in the north may not be the solution rather it can end up destroying and killing the cattle industry in the north.

Here is an article on Prussic Acid poisoning in grazing Cattle

[size=18pt]The Curious Case of the Poisoned Cows[/size]


ON A BRIGHT morning in early June, a Texas rancher named Jerry Abel turned his small herd of cattle out to graze. The 18 cows moved hungrily into that field of fresh grass. Within a few hours, only three were still alive.

Abel’s 80 acre ranch sits just a little east of Austin and the story was strange enough that on Sunday a local CBS affiliate picked it up. “There was nothing you could do,” Abel told KEYE about his desperate efforts to save the animals. “Obviously, they were dying.”

The television reporter apparently saw the evil hand of science at work in the episode, at least that was definitely the message in the story: “Genetically modified grass linked to cattle deaths.” Alternatively, she just didn’t do her homework because the grass in question – Tifton 85 – is not a GM product. It’s a decades old hybrid grass developed by Georgia agricultural scientists as a high-protein, easily digestible forage.

The CBS story was immediately circulated – and by circulated, I mean embraced – by anti-GM activists and bloggers. I wrote a summary of this for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker earlier this week which detailed both the activist enthusiasm for the story (one suggested that GM grass was practically producing chemical warfare agents) and the rapid corrective response from science writers who knew what “hybrid” actually meant. The you-got-this-wrong message was so strong that CBS News corrected the story within a day.

But my point here is not to review the media issue but to take a look at the Sherlockian mystery of how a pasture full of a well-known hybrid grass could suddenly turn so murderous. And I’ll give away part of the solution by reminding you of something we tend to forget in our obsession with the risks of synthetic chemistry and genetic engineering. What the Texas cow story reminds us – or should – is that naturally occurring chemistry can be just as wicked as anything we dream up in a laboratory.

There’s no debate over the poison that killed Mr. Abel’s cows. Hydrogen cyanide was found both in the cow’s bodies and in the grass itself. The veterinarian who autopsied the animals, called it prussic acid poisoning. Prussic acid is an old-time term for hydrogen cyanide (derived from hydrocyanic acid), dating back to some 18th century chemistry experiments in which a deep blue pigment used by artists, called Prussian Blue , was mixed with acid to generate the poison.

The foundation of any cyanide is a a cyano group – basically a carbon atom tripled bonded to a nitrogen atom (with the chemical symbol CN). Cyanides are natural joiners, attaching to other chemicals with enthusiasm. Thus we have the gases hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and cyanogen chloride (CNCl) and the salts – sodium cyanide (NaCN), potassium cyanide (KCN). All are acutely poisonous. And while I earlier mocked the anti-GM activist comparing Texas grass to chemical weaponry, both hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride do have military designations. The military symbol for hydrogen cyanide is AK.

But don’t let that fool you into thinking that cyanides are a human invention. They aren’t. We just capitalized on an invention of nature itself, a chemistry shared by numerous plant species including some grasses. Why? Most scientists believe that plants developed this chemistry as a way of fending off predators, from insects to grazers. The plants store cyanides in an inactive form but they can release them under threat or stress.

The stored forms of cyanide in plants are called cyanogenic glycosides. Basically this tells us that the cyanide is bound to – neatly locked up by – sugars in the plant. Under stress, though, the cyanide-sugar bond can break and the poison can be released. How many plant species hold this potential? Thousands. After the Texas cattle story appeared, the scientist and blogger Mary Mangan sent me a link to a 1998 article in the journal Phytochemistry titled “Why Are So Many Food Plants Cyanogenic”?

The paper’s author, David A. Jones, points out that “There are now sufficient examples of plant defense by cyanogenesis for us to conclude that cyanogenesis is an important system of chemical defense in plants.” He then reviews an astonishing variety of food plants that contain these precursor poisons, including wheat, barley, oats, rye, French beans, kidney beans, lima beans, apples, peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, almonds, Macadamia nuts, quince, papaya, passion fruit, bamboo shoots, cassava root, taro root and more.

As Jones notes, in most cases we are eating plants in which the cyanides remain locked up by the surrounding sugars. Or they are found in parts of the fruit, say, that we normally don’t eat – the seeds of the apple, the pit of the peach. And we usually eat them in a small enough amount (dose) and at a gradual enough rate that our own metabolic enzymes can break them down into a relatively harmless state. I say relatively because there are some instances of harm from what Jones calls “chronic cyanide poisoning of humans”, but these tend to occur in high risk groups. People with sickle cell diseases, tobacco smokers, people with Leber’s disease (an inherited degeneration of the optic nerve) seems less able to detoxify cyanogenic compounds. As one example of this, Jones cites a number of Leber’s patients who went blind due to the cyanogens found in apple cider.

None of this, you’ve probably noted, involves people or animals suddenly dropping dead of cyanide poisoning. Most of that of course, is because we’re still talking about consumption of those sugar-bound poison molecules. But what if the plant is an unhappy plant? What if it’s suffering from sustained, damaging stress? And what if, under that stress, the glycosides unravel and release pure hydrogen cyanide?

As we all know, Texas is in the midst of a sustained and destructive drought. And as it turns out, there’s quite a bit of research showing that forage grasses can become surprisingly poisonous when they are stressed by heat and drought. To that end, I refer you to this article from the University of Wyoming titled, “Managing Forages to Minimize Prussic Acid Poisoning.” Or “Livestock and Prussic Acid Poisoning” from Ohio State University. Or “Preventing Prussic Acid Poisoning of Livestock” from Oregon State University. And as it also turns out, the Tifton 85 grass in Mr. Abel’s field is a hybrid of Bermuda grass and star grass. And star grass is one of those cyanogenic plant species we’ve just been discussing.

All of which suggests that Mr Abel’s cows were caught in a lethal interaction between some very old and very well known plant chemistry and an entrenched period of hot, dry weather. As you’ve noticed, this doesn’t solve for the entire mystery. Why this pasture and not other Texas fields planted with Tifton 85? One possibility is suggested by an investigation by Natural News, which points out that heavy use of nitrogen fertilizers can influence the cyanogenic process. Natural News, of course, is firmly in the anti-GM camp but even it concluded that “there appears to be no GMO, no secret experiments, no conspiracy.”

There’s a hint of disappointment in that line. But there shouldn’t be. Because this piece of scientific detective work leads us to a point that – as I said earlier – we too often forget: that we live in a chemical world, amazing, complicated, ingenious, and occasionally wonderfully, startlingly, and terrifyingly lethal.

http://www.wired.com/2012/06/cyanide-and-poisoned-cows/

Don't you know that Buhari is a big dullardd. He can never understand all these grammar you are speaking. He's an illiterate burukutu-sipping gorrilla!

SMH @ OP.

Did you read what you posted at all? If you did, are you sure you don't have comprehension issues?

Let's even assume that your conclusion was correct. Are you aware that South America and Tropical Africa share similar climatic conditions?

My advice to you is this. You have to come to terms with the fact that President Buhari is your president till at least 2019(except of course the unforeseen happens). If by then you still feel this much "needless and baseless hatred" for him, you have the opportunity to send him out with your PVC. Rushing down to a faceless forum in order to smear him without proper information will only help you expose your ignorance.

However, you have every right to continue to display it. You're not alone in this. The poster above me is obviously one of your kind.

emorse:
SMH @ OP.

Did you read what you posted at all? If you did, are you sure you don't have comprehension issues?

Let's even assume that your conclusion was correct. Are you aware that South America and Tropical Africa share similar climatic conditions?

My advice to you is this. You have to come to terms with the fact that President Buhari is your president till at least 2019(except of course the unforeseen happens). If by then you still feel this much "needless and baseless hatred" for him, you have the opportunity to send him out with your PVC. Rushing down to a faceless forum in order to smear him without proper information will only help you expose your ignorance.

However, you have every right to continue to display it. You're not alone in this. The poster above me is obviously one of your kind.

Let me diverge a little...

Do you know how the 10 plagues in the bible actually occurred? Yes, I know it was an act of GOD but do you know how GOD did it?

Well it all started at the source of the River Nile - the Ethiopian highlands.

There is archaeological evidence pointing to heavy rainfall periods over the Ethiopian slopes dating back to the time of Moses - about 2,000yrs .

It so happens the heavy rains over the high grounds streamed down as flood streams and eroded much of the Ethiopian high grounds spewing iron rich minerals into the Nile basin.

The rich mineral content led to an explosion of algae in the river which gave it a reddish hue- this is when the Nile turned bloody!



This made the Nile River unsafe for consumption



The other plagues to come were all linked to the flooding of the Nile.

The frog plague came because the banks and marshes of the Nile were flooded which was good breeding for tadpoles.

The plague of the flies were also linked to the high humidity due to the flooded banks which saw the fly population explode

The flies transmitted Anthrax to livestock.

The severe hailstone storm was because the heated marshes evaporated and created super storms



The locust scourge occurs when there is enough vegetation and this occurred owing to the availability of moisture in the arid desert.

And finally, the death of the first borns was as a result of conginental condition prevalent in inbreeding populations brought about by the severe weather shift that affected their health.

[img]http://www.trowbridgegallery.com.au/gallery/History%20of%20Medicine%20Ancient%20Egypt%20(Small).jpg[/img]

AntiMahdi:


Let me diverge a little...

Do you know how the 10 plagues in the bible actually occurred? Yes, I know it was an act of GOD but do you know how GOD did it?....

[img]http://www.trowbridgegallery.com.au/gallery/History%20of%20Medicine%20Ancient%20Egypt%20(Small).jpg[/img]

Oga you're drifting very far away from the point. The first article you quoted tries to explain the fact that all plants, whether genetically modified or not, have some form of defence mechanism. If you had read the article further down, you would have seen this:

...None of this, you’ve probably noted, involves
people or animals suddenly dropping dead of
cyanide poisoning. Most of that of course, is
because we’re still talking about consumption of
those sugar-bound poison molecules. But what if
the plant is an unhappy plant? What if it’s
suffering from sustained, damaging stress? And
what if, under that stress, the glycosides unravel
and release pure hydrogen cyanide?

The article also points out that heat and drought could also be very serious factors to consider which is why I pointed out to you that we share similar climatic conditions with Brazil where the grasses are to be imported from. If there are still cattle in Brazil, then there's nothing for us to fear.

As regards the ten plagues, I knew all that already and I don't see the correlation with the topic at hand.

emorse:




The article also points out that heat and drought could also be very serious factors to consider which is why I pointed out to you that we share similar climatic conditions with Brazil where the grasses are to be imported from. If there are still cattle in Brazil, then there's nothing for us to fear.

The northern region does not share the same climate with tropical Brazil or Mediterranean south Africa

AntiMahdi:


The northern region does not share the same climate with tropical Brazil or Mediterranean south Africa

I said similar. Not the same. Check out some of the similarities below:

The climate of Brazil varies considerably
mostly from tropical north (the equator
traverses the mouth of the Amazon) to
temperate zones south of the Tropic of
Capricorn (23°26' S latitude). Temperatures
below the equator are high, averaging above
25 °C (77 °F), but not reaching the summer
extremes of up to 40 °C (104 °F) in the
temperate zones. There is little seasonal
variation near the equator, although at times it
can get cool enough to need to wear a jacket,
especially in the rain. Average temperatures
below the Capricorn Tropic are mild, ranging
from 13 °C (55 °F) to 22 °C (72 °F).

The Sahel Climate or Tropical dry climate, is
the predominant climate type in the northern
part of Nigeria. Annual rainfall totals are lower
compared to the southern and central part of
Nigeria.
Rainy season in the northern part of Nigeria
last for only three to four months (June–
September). The rest of the year is hot and
dry with temperatures climbing as high as
40 °C (104.0 °F) .

Wikipedia

Who Cares?

emorse:

I said similar. Not the same. Check out some of the similarities below:




Wikipedia

How can you claim the hot arid Sahelian region of west Africa shares similar weather conditions with tropical brazil ?

Well, if anything it is none of my business.

Let the dullard import hybrid grass that has been documented to be highly poisonous to grazing cattle.


That one nah their headache.

OP pls read before posting!

Not everything Buhari does must be opposed. But if u must oppose, then do that with some credibility

allthingsgood:
OP pls read before posting!

Not everything Buhari does must be opposed. But if u must oppose, then do that with some credibility

What rubbish are you insinuating ?


Hybrid grass have been scientifically linked to high cases of Prussic Poisioning in grazing cattle during drought periods.


Must you zombies always follow this blind bigot illiterate?

AntiMahdi:


How can you claim the hot arid Sahelian region of west Africa shares similar weather conditions with tropical brazil ?

Well, if anything it is none of my business.

Let the dullard import hybrid grass that has been documented to be highly poisonous to grazing cattle.


That one nah their headache.

Oga, I did not "claim". I included my source. Check the bold part of my previous post. The climatic condition below the equatorial region in Brazil ( ie as you move towards the tropic of Capricorn) is similar to the tropical dry climate in northern Nigeria. Temperature peaks at about 40°C in both regions. Carry out your own research and counter mine with facts.

Sorry your president is a "dullard". It speaks volumes of the people he presides over. Enjoy ur day sir. And as allthingsgood suggests, read your original post again - SLOWLY.

who is Buhari lbs?