Four die and dozens become ill after eating poisonous death cap mushroom
Four people have died and dozens more have fallen seriously ill after foragers ate a deadly fungus in the US.
The Californian authorities have issued multiple warnings since November and have asked people to stop foraging mushrooms altogether for the rest of the year after a concerning surge in cases.
Scores of foragers accidentally ate the fatal death cap mushroom, which is easily confused with edible species such as puffballs.
Experts said there is a ‘super bloom’ of death caps in the sunny American state this year due to early rains and warmer temperatures.
The death cap is a pale green or yellowish mushroom which kills people by releasing a powerful toxin called alpha-amanitin which inhibits an enzyme in the body’s cells.
This caused irreversible liver and kidney failure up to seven days after eating them, even if the death cap is cooked. It is one of the deadliest mushrooms in the world.
Since November 18, more than 35 cases of death cap poisonings in people aged 19 months to 67 years old have been reported to health officials in the US.
In a normal year, there are usually between two and five death cap poisonings.
Four people have died and three people have had to have liver transplants. Several patients were put into intensive care units.
Dr Craig Smollin, medical director for the San Francisco Division of the California Poison Control System, told the Daily Mail: ‘The main thing this year is just the magnitude, the number of people ingesting this mushroom.
‘Having almost 40 is very unusual.’
A woman who lives in the Northern Californian town Salinas told the San Francisco Chronicle that her family picked mushrooms that they ‘thought were safe’.
Laura Marcelino, 36, said the next day her husband felt dizzy and tired.
They ate the mushrooms again and the next day they were both vomiting. She was in hospital for five days and her husband had to have a liver transplant.
One day after eating the fatal mushrooms, people can suffer from diarrhea or vomiting but symptoms worsen rapidly after that when it becomes harder to treat patients.
Officials report that death cap mushrooms have been discovered in both local and national parks throughout Northern California and along the Central Coast, with concentrations documented in the Monterey area and the San Francisco Bay region.
A significant number of poisoning cases involve Spanish, Mixteco, and Mandarin-speaking individuals, leading the state to broaden its safety alerts into additional languages.
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