Deaths from Mushrooms in Zimbabwe

Mar 1, 2010

Deaths from Mushrooms in Zimbabwe

News reports out of Zimbabwe state that six people have recently died there from eating poisonous wild mushrooms. The article Toxic Mushrooms Kill Six shows a picture of Galerina autumnalis, but the article does not state which mushrooms are responsible for the tragic fatalities, which included a three year-old girl.

Six people have died in the last week after eating poisonous mushrooms in Beatrice, a small town 55km south-west of Harare, police said.

Four members of the same family, including a three-year-old girl, were among the dead, Mashonaland East police spokeswoman Assistant Inspector Thando Madhoyo said.

Don’t Feed Poisonous Fungi to Your Family and Friends

According to an earlier article on the same incident, Poisonous Mushroom Kills Two, a mother picked the mushrooms near her home and fed them to her family.

The event has spurred the government of Zimbabwe to publish Wild Mushroom Fatalities Avoidable:

WILD mushrooms account for a large number of food poisoning fatalities the world over, a development related to the morphology of fungi that makes it almost impossible to distinguish between edible and toxic species.

This week, we carried a tragic story of six people drawn from two families who died after eating wild mushrooms picked from a bushy area close to their homesteads at Keryboom and Albion farms in Beatrice.

Two parents, whose only wish was to feed and sustain their families, did not know that they were, in effect, giving them their last meal.