Quick! Get rid of your compost!

Man dies after inhaling fungal spores from garden compost | Science | The Guardian

 

Just in case I've frightened anyone. It's that white powdery stuff in dryish compost and grass cuttings. A hose should sort it out.

 

Thats something to be aware of Kindred, good find

I was grubbing about with piles of half rotted compost last week, and will be doing so again tommorow, building the autumn pile.

Will be vigilant now

 

Scary. I've had a face full of such dust on several occasions. Its unpleasant but so far thankfully its done no harm. I'll take more care in future.

 

I once stood on blackthorn clipping and ended up with a thorn right in my foot. It obviously hurt, but the pain didn't last very long and I just carried on with my day.

The next morning, I woke up feeling like death. At first I thought I was coming down with a bad cold, but it quickly became apparent it wasn't that. My head was banging. All my limbs were weak and I was dizzy. Typical flue symptoms but without the snot and sneezes, so I phone into work sick. When I got steadily worse, to the point where my muscles were doing strange random spasms, on top of the dizziness and headache, I decided I'd better call the doctors.

I got an appointment for a couple of days later. Fine I thought. If my symptoms worsen I'll treat it as an emergency, but for the time being I'll just accept it as a bug and wait for my doctors appointment.

As is so often the case, by the time I got to see the doc, I was fine, but a bit run down after my lurgy. The doc was sufficiently concerned by the description of my symptoms that he ran a full set of blood tests in case I'd poisoned myself. A couple of days passed and I went to see him again to discuss the test results. There was nothing at all wrong but he explained that there was evidence that my body had just waged war on something (didn't really understand, something to do with raised levels of some chemical or protein that's to do with immune response). He asked me loads of questions to try to get to the bottom of what it might have been. In the end, the conclusion was that the most likely cause was an allergic reaction to fungal spores off the thorn that went into my foot.

 

Blimey Dave

 

I think the moral of the tales contained herein is this:

Its all well and good being brave when we nick ourselves/inhale something we shouldn't etc, but we should still be a little bit careful, and if we do hurt ourselves, while we shouldn't panic and over react, we should still at least make sure its cleaned up properly asap, because you never know.

I bet the chap in the story that prompted this thread had inhaled the dust many times without complication, then just that once he drew the short straw.