A mother and son in Massachusetts are recovering after they ate highly-toxic "death cap" mushrooms for dinner.
Kam Look, 63, and her son, 27-year-old Kai Chen, had gathered the deadly mushrooms outside a friend's home in Amherst, according to UMass Memorial Medical Center officials.
Apparently, death cap mushrooms look a lot like the mushrooms the pair had used regularly in Malaysia.
"For me, it looked like any other cap mushroom that would be safe to eat," Chen said at a press conference following several weeks of treatment, per the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
The appropriately nicknamed death cap mushroom is one of the most lethal on the planet, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The death cap contains amatoxins, which cannot be inactivated by cooking and are readily absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract. Amatoxins halt intracellular protein synthesis, ultimately resulting in cell death. A lethal dose can be as low as 0.1 mg/kg, and a single mushroom can contain up to 15 mg, according to the CDC.
Within hours of ingestion, a person who eats the mushroom suffers from dehydration, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Without treatment, which includes aggressive fluid and electrolyte replacement, a person could suffer from liver and kidney failure and death.
By the time Look and Chen made it to the hospital, both had suffered severe and life-threatening liver damage. Doctors consulted with toxicology experts across the country and an experimental new drug called Legalon was flown in from Philadelphia and administered to the pair, the Gazette reported.
Although Chen recovered after the drug treatment, Look's liver needed to be replaced. Days after being put on a transplant list, an organ became available and Look underwent surgery.
The transplant was successful and the duo has since returned home -- where mushrooms are no longer part of their meals.
"This should be a cautionary tale about what you find out there in the woods, especially mushrooms," Look said, per the Gazette.
Known scientifically as Amanita phalloides, death cap mushrooms have a broad, off-white cap and measure several inches tall and across. They grow readily across the U.S. in moist and warm conditions and are often found in late summer and fall, particularly during heavy rainfall, growing under trees or in forests, according to the University of Wisconsin.
Related
Related
