Could you eat mold to fight an infection?

Try grinding it up and boiling it.
This might also be the time to start praying.

@Zyx For real, or for the lulz?

I might start eating mold if it was a “deadly” infection and I got to the “what the hell, can’t make it worse” stage, but I’d be looking around for wild garlic, goldenseal, echinacea and aloe and trying those first.

Depends what is ailing you. If its a bacteria then yea mold can help assuming you had the right kind, the likely hood of this however is really slim. Plants dont produce compounds to fight bacterias for the most part. But if if you had some sort of infection, some plants could fight that like the ones mentioned by @Blueroses. The question is really to vague to say what would be the proper line of action.

I think it depends on the mold you find. There are more than one type of mold :)

Let’s suppose you have some old bread with you. A loaf of white and a loaf of rye. The blue mold on the white bread might help you (penicillum mold) but the mold on the rye might kill you (ergot mold).

You mean the kind that grows on rye bread. I guess if you ate enough you wouldn’t care if you were poisoned and are going to die. Otherwise it’s pretty stupid question. You don’t eat random mushrooms that grow in the woods. Why would you even consider eating a mold with which you are not familiar?

@GeorgeGee or ergot will just make you trip face :P

@Ron_C ..I don’t think it’s a stupid question. A lot of people don’t know that there are thousands of mold species. Many just think “mold is mold” and that’s it.

Now now, didn’t you watch “Cast Away?” One has to wonder, if you’re stranded alone on a desert island with a bad infection in your foot and two moldy loaves of bread… what is the best course of action? I had to make a decision like this when I was in Mexico years ago and had accidentally drunk very questionable water. I decided to drink some iodine from a first aid kit afterward, not knowing for sure if it would kill the nasty stuff in the water I had drunk, or if it might make me seriously ill. Sometimes you have to take your best shot and go for it, but it does actually help to think about such possible scenarios in advance.

@GeorgeGee you would have been better off putting the iodine in the water first and letting it sit for ~30 min

@papayalily It’s been a while since I read up on this but if (like has already been said) you have the right kind of mold I think this is the proper procedure. I really should brush up on this stuff, it would be a shame to know it half my life and then need it and not know it.

The problem didn’t arise until I realized (as I already said) that I had accidentally drunk very questionable water. Sure in aftersight, you might even say “maybe you should have waited until you got back to the USA before drinking anything,” but that is of course totally useless advice. When you realize you have ALREADY drunk Mexican tap water, you have very few choices. You could sit and wait to die, you could cry, or you could try to improvise, a-la McGyver, with whatever you could find within arm’s reach. I didn’t die, I didn’t get sick, I think I made the right choice under the circumstances.

@GeorgeGee Yeah you probably did, though you wouldn’t neccecarily die from mexican tap water anyway. You could… Anyway iodine’s pretty poisonous but a single small dose shouldn’t cause any problems.

@Ron_C Because if you’re going to die anyway, it doesn’t seem so “stupid” to try any damn thing. If you think it’s a stupid question, then don’t answer it. I don’t insult your questions…

I always thought it was the mold from citrus kills off bacteria? But, I have no idea if that is true really? I would try it if I were desperate. If it were an open wound maybe put it right on there and eat some? I need to look it up now to see what is really feasible. Maybe Shiloh knows.

Penicillium mold grows well on both white bread and citrus; the antibiotic penicillin can
be made from it:
http://www.howtodothings.com/health-fitness/how-to-make-penicillin

@GeorgeGee That would seem to indicate this is has an extremely low chance of working if you need to do it quickly like for example I suggested. But I can’t seem to find anywhere if the penicillin is made through a chemical process or just filtered out of the rest of the junk. In the latter case you might have a chance if you managed to sterilize it.

@papayalily didn’t mean to insult you, I though the question was a joke. Even if I was going to die, I wouldn’t randomly eat mold. It is bad enough to die, there is no reason to eat a random piece of mold and increase the pain level and die with fluids flowing from all orifices.

What kinds of mold are we talking here? The kind that grows on bread makes me throw up so fast…if youre sick, getting more dehydrated is not gonna help you.

@Ron_C No, I was totally dead serious. It’s research for a paper I’m doing on The Black Plague. I never joke when doing research for a grade…

@papayalily there has been research about a genetic mutation that seems to have given certain people immunity to the plague. Are you interested in that? I could look for the article. It was a special on public television.

@JLeslie Yeah, that’d be great!

Here is the link to the PBS page. They believe the mutation fights HIV also. I did not reread it. I read it a long time ago.