'As little as a teaspoon can kill you, and there really is no cure.' 9News
Lydia Buchtmann, spokesperson for Food Safety Information Council, described foraging for mushrooms as "extremely risky" and likely to end with someone unwittingly eating a highly toxic death cap or yellow-staining mushroom and dying.
"I've sat down with mushroom experts and we can't tell the difference between a death cap mushroom and a safe mushroom, because they look different at different stages of their growth," Buchtmann told 9news.com.au.Although death caps appear very similar to common mushrooms people buy from supermarkets, they are lethal, she said.Some people who ingest the toxins are given an organ transplant but even that last-ditch life-saving effort is often futile.
"So our advice, absolutely, is not to pick or eat wild mushrooms at all because you cannot tell the difference," Buchtmann said. Death caps are considered the most poisonous mushrooms in the world and one is enough to kill an adult human. After eating the yet-to-be-identified mushrooms at the lunch in South Gippsland, sisters Heather Wilkinson and Gail Patterson died in hospital on Friday and Patterson's husband Don, 70, died on Saturday.Victorian police said today they are unsure if the poisoning was a crime or an accident. Investigations are continuing.
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