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.

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.

  • tja
    1·
    9 hours ago

    You wrote things that were blatantly false while offering advice on a subject you don’t know about–why?

    For instance:

    You cannot cook fungus toxins out. They are not potatoes.

    Is broadly wrong, there is nothing specific to mushrooms here, and this is entirely incoherent.

    You cannot taste mushroom toxins, they taste just like any other mushroom.

    Also incoherent and wrong.

    when everyone knows what’s trying to be communicated.

    Also incredibly presumptuious, and again wrong.

    I can’t and won’t make a single statement regarding guns. I happen to have been foraging for mushrooms for the majority of my life and care deeply about it.

    I’m really not trying to attack you here, I’m sure you know more about mushrooms than me, but I know I’m not broadly wrong for giving people advice for staying safe if they know less than either of us.

    I feel attacked, and I find your statement entirely disingenuous!

    For all of your intentions, you haven’t listed one relevant resource or factual article that will actually be of help to anybody who wants to know more on the subject, just a series of things and are incoherent and make no sense.

    This kind of pedantry is insufferable, I know you don’t mean it to be, but it turns people away from the whole topic. See: Reddit and The Fall of Unidan. You can have the best intentions and miss the train completely because you’re trying to force a conversation to use a specific language when the point of the conversation is very simple and aimed at non-experts in the field.

    Please suffer my padentry! For the sake of the dialog here, I can’t presume to know what readers will or won’t think about what I write here. I find that sort of paternalistic condensention revolting. It’s the height of arrogance to presume you know anything of those who are reading, be they your lessers or betters. But please don’t let me dissuade you for your own sake.

    I’ve written my bit and that’s done.

    fwiw, this obviously isn’t reddit and I have no idea what he reference to Unidan has to do with this.