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 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 6,100
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 Six go to hospital after dining on wild mushrooms [CA]
#6427133 - 01/05/07 05:53 AM (1 year, 9 months ago) |
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Six go to hospital after family dines on wild mushrooms
January 5, 2007 - mercurynews.com
On New Year's Day, six members of a Santa Cruz County family picked mushrooms from a nearby state park and folded them into a special meal they were preparing. By the next day, all six were in the hospital, having ingested what health officials suspect may have been highly toxic fungi known as death caps.
Public health officials have not identified the family members and refused Thursday to discuss their prognoses, but said the men and women were all so sick they had been transferred to Bay Area medical centers that specialize in such cases.
``As far as we know, everybody who partook in the meal became ill,'' said Fritzi Nelson, manager of the communicable disease unit at the Santa Cruz County Public Health Department. ``It's really sad. It's an entire family that became hospitalized.''
The family had gone mushroom hunting at Wilder Ranch State Park, a popular spot for hikers, cyclists and equestrians just north of Santa Cruz. They picked six species of mushrooms, health officials said. Three were analyzed by an expert and found safe, and a fourth was deemed mildly toxic, capable of causing digestive problems. But the family ate all of the final two species, making identification difficult.
Officials said some of the family members are foreign-born, although they declined to say which country they came from. Most often in the Bay Area, mushroom poisonings have involved immigrants familiar with the delicacies in their homelands who have mistakenly eaten toxic mushrooms that look strikingly similar to the edible species they're used to, said Dr. Tim Davern, a transplant hepatologist at the University of California-San Francisco.
There are thousands of different types of mushrooms in the United States and it's extremely difficult to tell them all apart. Some similarly shaped fungi can only be identified by noticing the slight color differences underneath the mushroom cap.
For that reason, people should only eat mushrooms from their local grocery store or farmer's market, unless they bring a mushroom specialist known as a mycologist along on their hunting excursions.
Judy Roger, executive secretary for the North American Mycological Association, said it wouldn't surprise her if the Santa Cruz County family was sickened by Amanita phalloides, often called death caps, which are commonly found in California and are cropping up all over the place this month.
People have become violently ill after eating just one death cap, Roger said -- ``and sometimes only half of that.''
Every year, about 9,000 Americans call poison control centers to report mushroom poisoning. Hundreds of those cases occur in California, with children younger than 6 accounting for most of them, according to the California Poison Control System.
Toxins from the most deadly types of mushrooms can cause liver or kidney failure and can be fatal unless patients quickly receive an organ transplant.
``When you're out in the wild picking mushrooms,'' said Dr. Beth Manning, a poison information specialist with the poison control system, ``if you're not an experienced mycologist that knows what you're doing, you're playing Russian roulette.''
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"All mushrooms are edible; but some only once." ~Croatian proverb
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 vinsue
OLDFART
Registered: 02/17/04
Posts: 2,947
Loc: Catskills,NY
Last seen: 1 month, 22 hours
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 Re: Six go to hospital after dining on wild mushrooms [CA] [Re: veggie]
#6427191 - 01/05/07 07:09 AM (1 year, 9 months ago) |
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Quote:
"All mushrooms are edible; but some only once." ~Croatian proverb
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 [image]http://files.shroomery.org/files/07-11/398071300-shrooms.gif [/image] "All mushrooms are edible; but some only once." ~Croatian proverb
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truffleupagus
nutsyfagan why-o-geeza-deech
 
Registered: 02/19/06
Posts: 2,100
Loc: 2 inches to the left
Last seen: 2 hours, 29 minutes
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Re: Six go to hospital after dining on wild mushrooms [CA] [Re: vinsue]
#6427893 - 01/05/07 12:43 PM (1 year, 9 months ago) |
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I like that vinsue. That's a good one.
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veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 6,100
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Re: Six go to hospital after dining on wild mushrooms [CA] [Re: veggie]
#6436403 - 01/07/07 08:59 PM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
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Hospital releases three sickened by mushrooms
January 7, 2007 - sfgate.com
Three of the six Santa Cruz residents who were sickened by eating wild mushrooms on New Year's Day were released from a San Francisco hospital today, while two family members remain hospitalized in critical condition, according to Kevin McCormack, spokesman for California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.
"Doctors are doing all they can to save the patients' lives, including using a variety of medicines to reduce toxins in their livers, with the help of blood transfusions," McCormack said of the two remaining in the hospital.
The two are so ill they may require liver transplants to survive. One family member was released earlier. The victims' names are being kept confidential; they range in age fro m17 to 77.
The family went on a mushroom-hunting expedition led by a grandmother visiting from Mexico. They had previously been on successful tasting trips, but this time appear to have mistaken poisonous fungi they collected at Wilder Ranch State Park, just north of Santa Cruz, for safe mushrooms that are common in Mexico.
edit 1/13: The sickest member of a county family poisoned by wild mushrooms from Wilder Ranch State Park on New Year's Day died Thursday. Epifania Miranda, 83, of Aptos succumbed to hepatorenal syndrome on her 10th day in hospital care, most at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, medical center spokesman Kevin McCormack said Friday.
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"All mushrooms are edible; but some only once." ~Croatian proverb
Edited by veggie (01/13/07 05:53 PM)
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