16 Die Due To Mushroom Poisoning In Assam: A Risk That Poor Tea Garden Workers Face Every Year

On Wednesday night, a total of 16 persons, including a minor boy, were taken ill after consuming poisonous wild mushrooms in North Assam's Dhemaji district.

This happened in two separate incidents. The first occurred in Misamara panchayat when eleven persons from different villages were affected by the poisonous mushrooms.

In the second incident near Silapathar town on the same day, five members of a family were affected.

The District Health Department report said that the people concerned had consumed mushroom curry on the night of Tuesday, June 20.

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After consuming the mushrooms, they suffered from vomiting, loose motion and severe abdominal cramp and had to be admitted to the hospital.

Not an isolated incident

Last month, eight members of a family fell ill after consuming ¡®poisonous¡¯ mushrooms in Assam¡¯s Sivasagar district.

In April of this year, three people died after consuming poisonous mushrooms in Assam¡¯s Golaghat district, including a two-year-old child. The incident was reported from the district¡¯s Merapani area, where 13 members of five families consumed the mushroom on April 2.

In April last year, 35 patients of mushroom poisoning from the Upper Assam districts of Charaideo, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar and Tinsukia were admitted to the Assam Medical College and Hospital, of which 13 died. All of them had consumed wild mushrooms.

Such cases of mushroom poisoning in Assam are pretty common.

A pattern can be noticed in the incidents reported. The victims are poor tea garden workers and these incidents occur mostly in March and April - when hundreds of mushrooms grow in the tea gardens of the State.

Living in abject poverty

Tea garden workers, many of whom belong to the Adivasi community, live in abject poverty.

Assam tea garden/ Wikimedia Commons

For years they have demanded a fair wage, but only in 2021 was the daily wage for workers in the Brahmaputra Valley raised to Rs 205, which is still less than the 351 they had originally demanded.

Scroll.in quotes Anjali Kharia who lost her six-year-old daughter in April last year after the family ate wild mushrooms, as saying, "That¡¯s why people like us have been forced to depend on nature, where edible vegetables like mushrooms are available freely in the rainy season."

Anjali Kharia, who lost her 6-year-old daughter to mushroom poisoning last year/ scroll.in

The Death Cap

After one of the deadliest mushroom-poisoning incidents in 2008, when 20 people died, the Assam government had set up a panel to investigate the same.

The panel found out that a poisonous variety of mushroom called Amanita Phalloides Vaill was responsible.

Called Death Cap, it is commonly found in Assam and has a dull green or white colour. It isn't easy to differentiate these from the edible ones.

The 'Death Cap' - Amanita Phalloides Vaill mushroom/ Wikimedia Commons

Consuming even one or two of these could be lethal.

Speaking to the BBC, Dilip Kumar Sarma, a scientist at the Assam Agricultural University, says, "A major reason for this is the lack of awareness among tea garden workers when it comes to types of mushroom - they don't know which kinds are rare, which are tasty, or which are poisonous."

He adds that creating awareness about which mushrooms might be poisonous is the only way to end the problem.

But for this to inculcate a behavioural change, it needs to be at the grassroots level.

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