Malaysia couple hospitalized after eating poisonous wild mushrooms

Muhd Basir Abidudin Abd Razak and Intan Nabila Mazelam, both 28, were hospitalized after eating poisonous wild mushrooms they believed were edible yearly mushrooms, the kind foragers in Kedah call kulat tahun. They cooked the mushrooms for lunch on June 28, fell ill within hours, and later collapsed at home in Sik, Kedah.

The rescue turned into a cramped, messy extraction. An emergency call came in at about 4:40 p.m., and two ambulances with five personnel from the Yayasan Jariah Malaysia Volunteer Brigade, also known as Briged Sukarela Yayasan Jariah Malaysia, responded. The team had to work around the couple’s combined weight and the tight space inside the house, which made it harder to move them safely to the ambulance. The operation took about 20 minutes before the pair were transferred to Hospital Sik later that evening.

Another detail makes the mistake even more familiar to anyone who hunts fungi after rain: the mushrooms were reportedly picked near a cattle shed at the couple’s home. That kind of setting can feel ordinary, even “local,” but location never confirms identity. The couple apparently assumed they had found Termitomyces, the termite-mound mushroom prized across parts of Southeast Asia after heavy rain. Instead, they had a toxic lookalike, and the result was severe vomiting and diarrhoea, the classic warning signs that a bad mushroom meal has already crossed from guesswork into danger.

Malaysian research has been blunt about the stakes. A 2024 Toxicon study described mushroom poisoning as a significant public health concern in Malaysia, identified Entoloma mastoideum in Sabah, and noted 10 poisoning cases during the rainy season of October 2019. A separate outbreak report from Kota Marudu recorded 10 patients from two localities and two families after notifications on October 15 and 16, 2019. The research also notes that mushroom poisoning can lead to organ failure and death, which is why Universiti Malaya has treated it as a differential diagnosis in acute gastroenteritis.

This is the hard lesson buried inside a story about a familiar seasonal food: folk names are not identification. “Yearly mushrooms” may be a trusted phrase in the field, but they do not protect you from a poisonous twin, and once the wrong mushroom is in the pan, the ambulance is the last place you want to be learning that lesson.