California officials are warning foragers after an outbreak of poisoning linked to wild mushrooms that has killed one adult and caused severe liver damage in several patients, including children.
The state poison control system has identified 21 cases of amatoxin poisoning, likely caused by death cap mushrooms, the health department said Friday. The toxic wild mushrooms are often mistaken for edible ones because of their appearance and taste.
“Death cap mushrooms contain potentially deadly toxins that can lead to liver failure,” Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “Because the death cap can easily be mistaken for edible safe mushrooms, we advise the public not to forage for wild mushrooms at all during this high-risk season.”
Crazy that people don’t know how to validate what they forage when there are deadly lookalikes. If you pick a yellow/white/green tinged cap with white gills, obvious attached annulus and a white volva, toss it aside, especially if you don’t know what any of that means. Foraging is fun, but there are far safer varieties that are easier to ID.
Rather, don't touch it, and if you do, wash your hands (in the woods? Come up with something that does not bruise!). These things might have so high load that even stains or spores could screw you up.
We once found one of these beauties: deadly poisonous raw, delicious when cooked seven times. I only touched it, and must have put my fingers to my mouth later: strong headaches and stomach pain for the rest of the day.
It's even worse: they differ in edibility across the globe. I've eaten them some times, they are mostly tasty because when they sprout in Spring it's mostly nothing else available; cooking is extremely important (it's more like 2 boilings really, 7 is a bit exaggerated). And worst part: apparently they also have some unwashable slow accumulating toxin that seems to cause cancer over loooong time. Well, still quite tempting, but I kind of try to keep away from this stuff - Finland is somewhat close to border where they might become too dangerous. To mess with me, they produce huge crops in my forest - that my friends are happy to take. Well then my forest also produces large amounts of Cortinarius rubellus that they also attempt to collect occasionally. I force them to wash their hands after showing and explaining to them ID - I mean, yeah, it's safe to just touch them, it's just if you went so far as collect them in the wild with intention to eat, I probably shouldn't trust you to know what you are doing, which is exactly thee requirement to be able to chew and spit out a deadly mushroom with no harm to yourself.