Innocent looking mushrooms sicken six

Six people have been hospitalized for treatment after eating poison mushrooms in Saint Paul.

The six, all of Hmong ancestry, ate meals of mushrooms gathered Saturday in Keller/Phalen Regional Parks in Saint Paul.

In a news release, the Minnesota Department of Health said three are still hospitalized, two of whom are in the intensive care unit.

"They prepared [the mushrooms] and ate them in two separate meals, and they became ill," said Buddy Ferguson, spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Health.

Ferguson said the mushrooms the family ate are Amanita bisporigera. A common name for the mushroom is the Eastern American Destroying Angel.

He said the first symptoms of Amanita bisporigera poisoning are similar to those of food poisoning; vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal cramps.

The problem comes when a poison victim begins to feel better.

"About three to five days out from eating the mushrooms, you can have some fairly serious liver and kidney damage," said Fersuson," so be very, very careful if you pick and eat wild mushrooms."

At Keller Phalen Regional Parks Friday, mushrooms were growing near a picnic table.

"They're very common right now," said Bryn Dentinger, a Ph.D. candidate in Plant Biology at the University of Minnesota.

Dentinger is studying mushrooms and since rains began falling in the Twin Cities area he has been out collecting mushrooms at least once a week.

"They're particularly abundant right now simply because we've had a lot of rain recently, and they're out in force," he said.

Dentinger said the Amanita grows close to Oak trees, and when it's young, looks like the Volvariella, or Paddy Straw, mushroom, common in Southeast Asia.

"A lot of people from Southeast Asia are very familiar with this mushroom and collect it frequently in Southeast Asia. But when they move to North America, where that mushroom doesn't occur, but these Amanitas do, they will often mistake it in the young stages for that Paddy Straw," he said.

Dentinger had collected several Amanita mushrooms eight days previous, and brought them back to his laboratory to grow them. He showed how the mature Amanita has a skirt-like annulus about two thirds of the way up the stem.

"When it's young, it looks like a small egg," he said, "which is really nothing like it looks now."

He said the Amanita is found throughout the eastern United States from late June until the first frost.

"A lot of the mushrooms we find in eastern North America don't occur in Southeast Asia, and vice versa, so they're just simply not familiar with this group of very poisonous mushroom," he said.

Dentinger offered this advice.

"Know your mushrooms!" "You should never eat anything that you're not absolutely certain that is edible. And if you're not certain it is, and you need help identifying it, there are lots of people around that would be more than happy to help you determine its safety as a food."

By Ken Speake, KARE 11 News

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