A group of French people who ate a popular wild mushroom developed rhabdomyolysis, a potentially fatal condition in which skeletal muscle fibres break down, the New England Journal of Medicine reports this week. Twelve people were hospitalised for severe weakness and muscle loss after eating the mushrooms, and three of them died, wrote Dr. Regis Bedry of the poison centre of University Hospital Pellegrin in Bordeaux, France. These researchers suspected that ingestion of wild mushrooms was the source of the illness because the patients had ingested substantial amounts of wild mushrooms and no other cause could be found. All 12 patients had eaten at least three meals containing the toxic mushroom Tricholoma equestre. After experiments on mice the researchers went on to demonstrate that extracts from Tricholoma equestre can cause rhabdomyolysis in mice, therefore strongly supporting a causative relation although the toxic metabolite in T. equestre remains to be identified. Full findings are published in the New England Journal of Medicine Vol. 345, No. 11
