Death cap mushroom toll climbs as state officials plead for halt to foraging

All that rainy weather over the holiday season appears to have turbo-charged a deadly outbreak of mushroom poisonings across the California coast, state health officials warned Wednesday.

Three people died from mid-November through early January and another three people needed liver transplants after eating toxic mushrooms across the state, according to the California Department of Public Health.

It all comes amid a massive bloom of aptly named death cap mushrooms, which has been fueled by potent storm systems in October and December and has left health officials pleading with foragers to stop collecting wild mushrooms altogether.

“Since death cap mushrooms are easily confused for safe-to-eat, lookalike mushrooms, all mushroom foraging should be avoided,” the health department warned foragers Wednesday.

In all, 35 people have been hospitalized from Nov. 18 through Jan. 6 across Northern California and the Central Coast, the health department reported. The poisonings have affected people ages 19 months to 67 years old, from Sonoma to San Luis Obispo counties, the agency reported.

The Bay Area ranks among the hardest-hit areas, with poisonings reported in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.

Amatoxin mushrooms — such as the feared death cap — can cause severe gastrointestinal illness that can ultimately lead to organ failure if left untreated. Initial symptoms — which tend to appear within six to 24 hours of ingesting a death cap — can include watery diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and dehydration, the state health department said.

Often, those symptoms can deceptively improve for a time, before causing fatal complications within two to four days of eating the mushroom.

Cooking, boiling, freezing or drying death caps does little to mitigate their toxicity. East Bay parks officials have previously described death caps as having a “greenish-gray cap, white gills, a white ring around the stem and a large white sac at the base of the stem.”

Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at jrodgers@bayareanewsgroup.com.