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Thursday, July 15, 2010

China : Tiny mushrooms blamed for 400 deaths

Via AP :


" BEIJING : Every year during the height of the rainy season, villagers of all ages in a corner of southwestern China would suddenly die of cardiac arrest.

No one knew what caused Yunnan Sudden Death Syndrome, blamed for an estimated 400 deaths in the past three decades.

After a five-year study, an elite investigative unit from China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention believes it has pinpointed the cause: an innocuous-looking mushroom known as Little White.

The search for the culprit took investigators to remote villages spread over the rural highlands of Yunnan province, said Robert Fontaine, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There was "this very obvious clustering of deaths in villages in very short periods of time in the summer," said Fontaine, who helped in the investigation. "It appears that there was something a little different going on."

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