People with a taste for haute cuisine are ending up in hospital after mistaking poisonous puffballs for rare truffles.
Four people became ill when they confused the prized Perigord black truffle, which sells for $10,000 a kilogram, with the potentially deadly thick-skinned puffball found in parks andgardens.
The Medical Journal reports how one 51-year-old Ashburton woman picked some of the puffballs from beneath an oak tree in her garden and fried them in butter, thinking she would enjoy a taste of the finer things in life. Instead, she was rushed to hospital suffering blurred vision and with her blood pressure dangerously low.
Since then doctors have reported three similar poisonings around the country and appealed to the public to leave truffle hunting to the truffieres - experts who use specially trained dogs and pigs to dig up the delicacies.
The National Poisons Centre said it knew of a further four adults and four children from Rotorua and Tauranga who had been poisoned by puffballs after apparently mistaking them for truffles.
The Perigord truffle, or Tuber malanosporum, is prized by gourmets and until recently was found only in France, Italy and other parts of Europe. In 1983 it was introduced to New Zealand and is now grown commercially in Gisborne.
Around 30 trained truffle hunters have set up business there.
But rumours that wild truffles have spread to other parts of New Zealand after being eaten and dispersed by rodents have prompted the gourmet and the greedy to dig for culinary gold.
Ashburton Hospital specialist Dr Rhonu Ghose said: "Unfortunately they are so expensive that most people have never seen a real truffle and are mistaking the poisonous puffball Scleroderma flavidum for black truffles. The odd thing is these puffballs look nothing like black truffles but people think they fit in with their idea of what a truffle is."
Dr Ghose said most of the victims had been from the farming community.
He hoped the poisoning cases could have a long-term positive medical spinoff in terms of the puffball's effect in dramatically lowering blood pressure.
