This story was produced by El Tímpano, a civic media organization serving and covering the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities. The original version of the story can be found here. Sign up for their newsletters here.
The day before Christmas Eve, M.G., a 34-year-old Maya Mam immigrant from Guatemala, was walking through a park in the East Oakland hills with her husband and two children when she noticed a cluster of fleshy white mushrooms poking out of the rain-dampened soil.
They looked familiar. In the highlands of her native Guatemala, a similar-looking mushroom, known colloquially as a piosh, is commonly foraged from the wild and eaten. Believing she had found the same mushroom, M.G, who asked to be identified by her initials, plucked one from the ground and brought it home. That evening, she cooked it for dinner. She, her husband, and her teenage son ate the mushroom–infused dish. The only person in the family who did not was M.G’s young toddler, who tried a bite of the fungi and spat it out.
About eight hours later, M.G began to feel sick. So did her husband and son. They felt nauseated and were vomiting, and had muscle fatigue and diarrhea, she explained in Mam, a Mayan language, through a translator. Their symptoms worsened as the day wore on. Her husband’s condition, in particular, deteriorated rapidly. By the evening, they went to the hospital, where they learned the source of their sudden decline. The mushroom was not the edible variety M.G thought she recognized from Guatemala, but rather a highly toxic lookalike common in California: the death cap.
An exceptionally wet series of early winter storms in the Bay Area has led to a surge in the sprouting of death caps, among the most poisonous mushrooms in the world, across the region’s parks, hills, and trails. The super bloom has coincided with what public-health officials describe as an unprecedented wave of mushroom poisonings that appears to be disproportionately impacting immigrant communities, especially Spanish speakers.
Dr. Craig Smollin, medical director of the San Francisco Division of the California Poison Control System, called it “the largest outbreak we’ve ever experienced in California of mushroom poisoning.” Many of the patients, he added, “have been immigrants.”
Since November 2025, four people in California have died after eating the mushroom, according to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), 40 people have been hospitalized, and at least three people have required liver transplants, among them M.G’s husband. The numbers represent a striking departure from a typical number of mushroom poisonings a year in California. Over the past three months, the total number of people who have been hospitalized after eating toxic mushrooms is about eight times the amount of the state’s annual average. The majority of the people affected speak Spanish as their primary language, CDPH reported, though other cases were documented among speakers of Mandarin, Ukrainian, Russian, and the Indigenous languages Mixteco and Mam.
The center of the outbreak is in the Bay Area, which accounts for six of the 10 counties statewide reporting hospitalizations, in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Sonoma counties. At least two of the four reported fatalities were Bay Area residents of Latino descent and one spoke Spanish as a primary language, El Tímpano has learned. One of the deaths was a Contra Costa County resident, health officials reported in January.
Public health experts believe immigrants who forage as part of cultural practices in other parts of the world, such as Indigenous communities in Mexico and Guatemala, are confusing the death caps with edible, visually similar varieties that are commonly gathered and eaten from the wild in their home countries. But in California, where the ecological landscape is different, the consequences of this accidental mixup can be fatal.
“Even a single bite can cause death,” said Smollin. Death cap mushrooms contain a toxin, called amatoxin, that destroys the body’s capacity to build proteins, which can cause liver failure. Crucially, there is no safe way to eat the death cap, Smollin explained, because cooking will not neutralize the mushroom’s toxins. “So if you’re going out and picking [it] for food, you’re really taking your life into your own hands.”
M.G’s husband may have lost his life had he not gotten an emergency liver transplant at the hospital. The doctors who treated him explained that he had an undiagnosed liver condition that was exacerbated by the toxins in the death cap, which likely accelerated his liver failure, M.G said. He spent three weeks recuperating in the hospital and is currently taking medication and recovering from a health scare that left the entire family shaken. “Thank God he is alive,” she said.
As another series of powerful storms moves through the Bay Area, state and local public health agencies are now racing to warn residents about the poisoning outbreak. The wet weather has introduced another threat: the toxic western destroying angel mushroom, which typically fruits from late winter to spring. The mushroom contains the same toxin as the death cap and can also cause severe liver failure, according to Dr. Lucía Abascal, a public health clinician for the California Department of Public Health. Like the death cap, poisoning symptoms often start with vomiting and diarrhea several hours after consumption. At least one poisoning case has already been linked to the species.
Debbie Viess, the co-founder of the Bay Area Mycological Society, said while the death cap mushroom blooming period is largely over, western destroying angels are already proliferating across parts of the Los Angeles area and have been spotted in the Bay Area. Their bloom could intensify following a few wet weeks, potentially adding to what Viess has described as an “insane number of poisonings” over the past few months.
On a walk through Pleasant Hill’s Paso Nogal Park on Valentine’s Day, Viess identified several toxic mushrooms along a five-minute stretch of trail. She pointed out a white cluster of death caps blooming beneath a large oak tree. “You could kill a lot of people with that,” she said.
To the untrained eye, the features that distinguish a lethal mushroom from one that enrich a dinner stir-fry are not easy to spot. Mycologists spend years in the field, studying the features of local mushroom species so they can safely identify the deadly varieties while foraging.
Yet these distinctions are subtle, and often hard to catch. On the trail, Viess crouched in front of a large white mushroom with a partially broken cap, an edible species she had just foraged the previous day for dinner. “But look at the color here,” she said, pointing to the top of the mushroom. “They have a very similar cap color to when the [western destroying angel] gets that orange color. So it’s tricky.”
Foraging has become a risky endeavor for people who aren’t aware of these small and often indetectable nuances. California health officials believe immigrants like M.G are encountering mushrooms that closely resemble edible species from home, picking them, and bringing them home to eat.
“In many of the cultures of monolingual Spanish speakers or Indigenous language speakers from other countries, these mushrooms are visually very normal and can be very easily confused with edible mushrooms,” said Dr. Abascal. She grew up in Mexico, where foraging wild mushrooms in the mountains is common. “You would never think they’re not edible,” she said. “I think that’s where people are coming from when they are consuming these mushrooms.”
Although the California Department of Public Health has not released biographical information about the poisoning fatalities, El Tímpano has confirmed that at least two of the four people who died after eating the toxic mushroom were Bay Area residents of Latino descent.
In early January 2026, a Latino adult male resident of Sonoma County passed away after eating a wild mushroom, according to information provided exclusively to El Tímpano by a spokesperson from the Sonoma County Department of Health Services. A few weeks later, a man in his 60s died after consuming mushrooms foraged at a regional park in Contra Costa County. The man, who was of Latino descent and spoke Spanish as his preferred language, may have mistaken the mushroom for a species that is edible in his home country, according to county officials.
With the western destroying angel season underway amid a series of storms in the Bay Area, getting the right information to non-English speaking immigrants can be a matter of life and death.
Crecencio Ramirez, who shares news in Mam for Bay Area residents through the community radio station Radio B’alam, broadcast a Facebook live segment about the poisonings in January after hearing M.G’s story. Ramirez displayed photos of death caps alongside images of edible species to demonstrate their visual resemblance. Shortly after the broadcast went live, Ramirez heard from multiple Mam-speakers who shared that they had accidentally foraged what they believed to be death caps in the Oakland hills and were preparing to cook them. After watching the video, they changed their minds.
“A lot of people reached out to us, really thankful that we saved their lives,” Ramirez said. “They were about to cook the mushrooms, they had them in the kitchen. But then after they heard that they were poisonous, they threw them away.”
On Jan. 26, El Tímpano sent a text message to Spanish-speaking immigrants living in the Bay Area, informing them about the outbreak and sharing California’s poison control phone number. One subscriber, an Oakland resident, replied that he knew people who had foraged wild mushrooms they believed were edible and later became seriously ill.
Think you ate a poison mushroom?
Symptoms of mushroom poisoning, which include abdominal pain, vomiting, cramping, diarrhea and nausea, typically appear about 12 hours after consumption.
If you think you may have eaten a poisonous mushroom, seek medical care immediately or call Poison Control at 1-800-222-1222.
The California Department of Public Health and the California Poison Control System have launched multilingual outreach campaigns to warn Californians about the risks of foraging wild mushrooms. Educational materials include posters placed at trailheads with QR codes linking to nine languages, including Spanish, Mixteco, an Indigenous language from Mexico, and the Mayan languages Kʼicheʼ and Mam. In Alameda County, the public health department recently hosted a free online class in Spanish aimed at educating Spanish- and Mam-speaking residents about deadly wild mushrooms in the Bay Area. A local naturalist explained how to identify toxic species.
Molly Chung, a program manager for the Alameda County Public Health Department, said the idea for the class came about after learning that several poisoning victims were of Indigenous origin.
“The reason we wanted to reach out specifically to the Indigenous population is because as part of your culture, if you’re foraging for food, we don’t want to take that away,” Chung said. “But we also want to inform people and let them know that there are types of mushrooms here that don’t exist in your home country.” Many attendees were promotoras, or local health promoters who work closely with the Spanish and Mam-speaking communities and can relay the information to their networks.
California public health officials are urging people not to forage for wild mushrooms and advising anyone who may have eaten a toxic mushroom to immediately seek medical attention.
Yet seeking medical care can be fraught with anxiety for some of the populations most at risk. People without legal status in particular may be wary of venturing to hospitals and clinics amid the threat of ICE enforcement. “Our message is still to seek care,” Abascal said, “because the consequences are so dire and so fatal.”
She stressed that California’s poison control hotline, which operates 24/7 in over 200 languages, is confidential. “Whatever you say in that hotline is completely private. We just want to get you the help you or someone you love might need,” she said.
If you or someone you know has eaten a poisonous mushroom, call the California Poison Control Hotline at 1-800-222-1222.
Martha Calmo Ramirez contributed to this report.
