unless you fall out of them,
or one falls on you!, but this tree is the very devil itself, along the coasts of the Caribbean, Central America, the
northern edges of South America and even in southern Florida, you can find a
nice-looking beach tree, often loaded with small, very greenish-yellow fruits
similar to apples, whose pleasant aroma invites you to take a bite. It is
best not to fall into that temptation, because it is a poisonous fruit, known
as the Chamomile of death or tree of death (Hippomane mancinella), it is sometimes known as the beach apple, the
plant bears another name in Spanish, arbol de la muerte, which literally
means "tree of death". According
to the Guinness World Records, the manchineel tree is in fact the most
dangerous tree in the world, as explained by the Florida Institute of Food and
Agricultural Sciences, all parts of manchineel are extremely poisonous, and
"interaction with and ingestion of any part of this tree may be
lethal" the tree belongs to the large and diverse Euphorbia genus,
which also contains the decorative Christmas poinsettia, the tree produces a
thick, milky sap, which oozes out of everything - the bark, the leaves and even
the fruit - and can cause severe, burn-like blisters if it comes into contact
with skin, that's because the sap contains a range of toxins; it's thought that
the most serious reactions come from phorbol, an organic compound that belongs
to the diterpene family of esters, because phorbol is highly water-soluble, you
don't even want to be standing under a manchineel when it's raining - the
raindrops carrying the diluted sap can still severely burn your skin, "The
real death threat comes from eating its small round fruit," Ella
Davies writes for the BBC. "Ingesting the fruit can prove fatal when
severe vomiting and diarrhoea dehydrate the body to the point of no
return." the tree of death indeed!
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