14 poisoned by toxic mushrooms.
Fourteen people in and near the Bay Area were poisoned and three needed liver transplants after eating poisonous wild mushrooms that popped up in big numbers during winter’s drought-busting rains.
One 18-month-old victim who needed a liver transplant ate wild mushrooms that her mother got from someone she didn’t know, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The unusually high number of poisonings occurred in December when early rains stir the fungi caps to pop above ground and become visible to foragers, the CDC said. In a typical year, only a handful of mushroom poisonings are reported throughout the entire state.
“It’s definitely a higher than-normal number of cases,” said Stuart Heard, the executive director of the California
Poison Control System, which operates a toll-free poison hot line. “There were a lot of these mushrooms popping up after several years of drought followed by a very wet year.”
Heard said the high number of poisonings underscores the need for the public not to eat mushrooms from the wild unless an experienced mushroom expert verifies the safety of the fungi. Several types of deadly mushrooms resemble harmless ones.
The highly toxic “death cap” mushroom that thrives in Northern California oak forests closely resembles another edible mushroom.
The death cap mushroom, the cause of the 14 Bay Area cases in December, has toxic alkaloids that damage cells by halting protein synthesis.
The poisonings occurred in Alameda, Santa Cruz, Sonoma, Monterey and Sacramento counties, officials said. They refused to release the names of victims for privacy reasons.
Poisoning victims ranged in age between 18 months and 93, and their hospital stays ranged from three to 36 days.
The first case was a 37year-old Santa Rosa man who ate one mushroom he collected in early December and within 10 hours was vomiting. He showed signs of liver distress within 20.5 hours. He recovered after six days in the hospital.
Within two weeks, 13 other cases were reported, including a Mexican-Indian family of five who were treated at a Salinas hospital after they that ate soup with wild mushrooms that resembled edible ones they collected in the wild in Mexico. All five got sick. The 18month-old girl and her aunt needed liver transplants, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.
A single death cap mushroom can kill. In 2012, four people died in a senior care facility in Loomis near Sacramento after they ate a soup with poisonous mushrooms.
Federal officials said an antidote to the death cap is permitted for use in many European countries, and officials are evaluating it for use in the United States.