File photo of mushrooms. (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
HARTFORD (CBS Hartford) — A Newington woman accidentally poisoned her family after cooking mushrooms picked from her backyard.
The Hartford Courant reports that 40-year-old Shah Noor cooked the mushrooms from her backyard for dinner for her family last Thursday. The next day, though, Noor, her husband and two daughters went to St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center after they all started vomiting and suffering extreme stomach pains.
“When I called, I heard this hue and cry,” husband Musarat Ullah, 59, told the Courant.
The family ate mushrooms from the deadly Amanita bisporigera species, also known as “destroying angels.”
“Amanita bisporigera is what I believe she ate, which contains the Amanitin toxin that damages the liver cells,” Danyal Ibrahim, a St. Francis toxicologist, told WVIT-TV.
One of the daughters, 24-year-old Wafa Guloona, suffered the brunt of the poisonous mushrooms, with her liver almost completely breaking down before Ibrahim was able to treat her with experimental drug silibinin, according to the Courant. She recovered immediately after receiving the drug.
Ullah told the paper that he never had problems eating picked mushrooms when he lived in Pakistan decades ago.
“We never came across anything like this,” Ullah said. “I don’t know much about the technicalities of mushrooms.”
Guloona is expected to be released from the hospital Thursday. The rest of the family were released from the hospital earlier this week.
