Capsules

> One of the more common bits of folklore about American Indians is that they are less able than whites to hold their liquor because of an inherited intolerance for alcohol. Now two medical researchers at a Phoenix, Ariz., branch of the National Institutes of Health and the Indiana University School of Medicine have challenged that belief. Using 30 Indian and 30 white volunteers as test subjects, Drs. Lynn J. Bennion and Ting-Kai Li let each slowly down a 3-oz. jigger of 50% ethanol, the form of alcohol in liquor. After a lapse of 90 minutes to allow total absorption of the alcohol into the bloodstream, they began taking blood samples from the subjects once every 30 minutes over a three-hour period. The tests invariably showed that the rates at which ethanol disappeared from subjects' bloodstreams did not differ by race. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers conclude that there is no significant difference in the way Indians and whites get (or don't get) stewed.

> Few natural substances are more lethal than the toxin of the poisonous mushroom Amanita phalloides. Commonly known as the death cap, it causes, after a day's delay, severe abdominal pain, followed by diarrhea, cramps and vomiting and finally liver failure and central nervous damage. In Europe, where mushroom collecting has long been a favorite hobby of gourmets, the hard-to-identify Amanita phalloides accounts for perhaps 95% of the dozens of deaths that occur every year from mushroom poisoning of some kind. Until recently the death cap was considered relatively rare in North America, and only a few cases of poisoning have been attributed to it.

Now the U.S. Public Health Service's Center for Disease Control reports new evidence that Amanita phalloides may not be as uncommon in the New World as hitherto believed. For example, in October two people died of mushroom poisoning--a 37-year-old Martha's Vineyard resident who collected Amanita phalloides in his backyard and a 70-year-old Bronx man who picked the mushrooms in a New York park and ate them.

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