Four people have died and three others have required liver transplants after eating the aptly named death cap mushroom that is proliferating in California following a rainy winter.
The California Department of Public Health is urging people to avoid mushroom foraging altogether this year because death cap mushrooms are easily confused with safe, edible varieties.
Since Nov. 18 there have been more than three dozen cases of death cap poisonings reported, including the four deaths and three liver transplants, according to the health department. Many who sought medical attention suffered from rapidly evolving acute liver injury and liver failure. Several patients required admission to an intensive care unit. They have ranged in age from 19 months to 67 years old.
The death cap is one of the most poisonous mushrooms in the world and is part of a small group of mushrooms containing amatoxins, which are highly potent compounds causing 90% of fatal mushroom poisonings globally. They are in city parks and in forests, often under oak trees.
I forage mushrooms. I think there is both a healthy fear and an overreaction to how dangerous it really is. A novice can forage for something like chicken of the woods because it is an obvious species that has no deadly lookalikes. However there are mushrooms even I still avoid despite knowing exactly what they are because they have poisonous lookalikes.
What’s really surprising is people seem to think foraging plants to be safer despite there being plants with edible lookalikes like poison hemlock that can kill in minutes.
In the end, a little bit of practice, focus, and understanding safety, mushroom foraging, and plant foraging, is actually much less dangerous than one would imagine. Still, if you don’t know what you are doing you should never eat a mushroom or plant that you aren’t 100% certain is what it is. Never munch on a hunch.
Are you in the PNW? I wonder if there are safer places to forage than others.
I’m in the Northeast US. There is a lot of overlap in species but there are also a lot of differences. I wouldn’t say there is any region in the world that is safer than others. What makes it safe vs dangerous is how much time you spend learning about your region and safe practices.