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.
Please stop using toxic as a general term here, it's not specific and does nothing but introduce ambiguety and fear where it's unwarrented. Using it this way provides nothing in terms of exposure or specific compounds and amounts to introducing non-specific fear-mongering terminology. Please avoid using it like this.
In addition, using "safe mushroom" makes it worse. For instance, Morels and chicken of the woods along with other mushrooms need to be cooked before eating. Due to a chef not knowing Morels needed to be cooked, 51 people became ill in 2023: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7310a1.htm
Chicken of the wood is fine, so long as it's growing on broadleaf wood and cooked. If you eat then when they grown on an evergreen wood--you will become ill, even if prepared correctly.
Using the term 'safe mushroom' ignorant of the way it needs to be handled in order to be safe is an activly harmful way to deal with this.
When dealing with mushrooms, the spefics and details are what matters. Introducing language on the topic without careful awareness of this is actively harmful.
If you don't know--that's fine, but please don't offer advice when the terms you use introduce yet more ambiguety.