https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/09/australia-poisonous-mushroom-lunch-police/
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1247075
Archived version: https://archive.ph/dJJGi
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230809131335/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/09/australia-poisonous-mushroom-lunch-police/
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A food dehydrator found at a local landfill is apparently also being tested to see if there is any link, Melbourne’s Age newspaper reported, citing an anonymous police source close to the investigation.
Police have not named those who died, but according to local media reports, they were the host’s parents-in-law, Gail and Don Patterson, both aged 70, and Heather Wilkinson, 66.
In the fall of 2016, during an unusually large bloom in the San Francisco Bay Area, three people required liver transplants after eating the deadly mushrooms.
Several members of one household — including an 18-month-old girl — became seriously ill after eating grilled death caps given to them by someone who had apparently picked them in the mountains earlier that day.
In a potential twist in the Australia case that was seized on by local media, the lunch party host’s estranged husband, Simon Patterson, nearly died last year from what he described as “serious gut problems.” In a Facebook post at the time, he said he collapsed at home and spent 16 days in an induced coma, undergoing several operations, mostly on his small intestine.
“I don’t think there’d be any person in this town who wouldn’t be feeling grief at the moment,” said local resident Leigh Spaull, whose children were taught by one of the victims.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What? The article is about shrooms?! Worst clickbait offender I've seen in a while. Screw this news outlet.
Deadly poison mushrooms, not what people normally refer to as "shrooms", i.e. psychedelic mushrooms.
It's the difference between drugs and poison, literally the same.
Some mushrooms have psychedelic properties, others just contain poison that will kill you. Pro tip don't eat the poisonous ones, they all look very similar, although I think death caps actually do warn you by being giant and red, but this sounds like a murder rather than accident.
Mushrooms in general are one of those things you should stay away from unless you are 100% certain you know what you are doing.
Death caps aren't red, they're more like a pale green or even entirely white. You're probably thinking of fly agaric, which is also poisonous but not nearly as much so as death cap.
There is a wide variety of poisonous fungi and some of them can look deceptively similar to edible ones. "All poisonous mushrooms look similar" is really not true so yes, never eat anything that you can't identify with 100% certainty.
Death caps actually don't look obvious at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_phalloides
Can easily be mistaken as edible.
Edit: just clarifying, I agree with everything else you said.
No, that isn't really a great summary. A mushroom poisoning is suspected, but not confirmed to be the cause of death of the people at the party. The article goes on a bit of a tangent.