Death Caps

By Daniel Butler, forager and author

Death caps have been very much in the news recently thanks to the current Australian murder trial, where Erin Patterson, is accused of deliberately poisoning four relatives with a beef Wellington made with foraged mushrooms. Three of the five diners died, one narrowly survived, while Elin was relatively unaffected and protests her innocence, saying it was a ghastly accident.

Death caps are comparatively common in Britain in late summer and autumn

Picture: Charles Pottinger

Now, I talked about toxicity in my last blog and touched on this case. It is also sub judice so I won’t comment further, but there are still general observations one can make about Amanita phalloides.

This mushroom really does live up to its name. It contains several powerful compounds which are generally grouped as Amatoxins. The mushrooms are quite safe to handle, but they become ultra-dangerous if ingested. Worse, processing (as in drying or cooking) does not affect their potency. If accidentally consumed, once the poisons move from the stomach into the bloodstream they start to have a devastating impact. Unlike most organic toxins, they are not degraded as they travel around the body and each time they move through the liver and, to a lesser extent, kidneys, the poisons repeat their destructive work. As a result, even a small dose – say one mushroom – is enough to kill an adult.

This means once the Amatoxins are in the bloodstream, there is little doctors can do for the patient. At present the best practice seems to be to give multiple blood transfusions and ‘aggressive’ rehydration in an attempt to flush the poisons out before too much liver damage has occurred.

It’s not all bad news, however. Recent European medical research suggests Amatoxins could have therapeutic potential. Many fast-growing cancers are notably weaker than normal body cells. Research currently focusses on using biological markers attached to minute doses of Amatoxins to latch onto the tumour. This has obvious advantages over many conventional radio- and chemotherapy treatments, but it should be stressed any such treatments are still in the research stage.