The villagers in Yunnan village often suffer from sudden death due to eating wild mushrooms

For more than 30 years, almost every summer, death will come to this small village on the rugged highlands of Yunnan Province. When a peasant woman named Li Linmei took a basket of mushrooms and walked through the path of the village of Wangjiacun and saw a new white curtain hanging in front of a small bungalow, she could know that someone in the village had been “pulled away”.

Wangjia Village is a small village east of Dali, Yunnan Province. It takes approximately an hour by car to Dali City. Each year, when the monsoon and seasonal rain arrive at the end of June, people of different ages will mysteriously die one by one in the village.

No one knows who the "murderer" is.

The only doctor in the village, Li Guanghui, came out of the mourning confession. He frowned and said to himself: "Who will be the next to die?" At this point, Li Linmei did not even think that the fearful death was very likely to be hidden in the basket in her hands.

Mysterious killer

The similar death cases that occurred in Wangjia Village and surrounding areas were all referred to as the “unexplained sudden death in Yunnan” case. Since 1978, more than 400 deaths and tens of non-fatal heart disease cases have been attributed to this type of "unexplained sudden death syndrome."

Like magic spells, these "unexplained" sudden deaths are always concentrated and the villagers have died without warning. Therefore, when the first dead person appears in the village, it often triggers panic among other villagers.

However, no one knows the true face of the murderer. The 50-year-old Li Linmei remembers that from the end of the 1970s onwards, during the rainy season every year, many experts came from Kunming and even Beijing to drill into the village about 2,000 meters above sea level. These city-wearing glasses always frown, draw pictures on the book, and then leave one after another.

In June 2005, Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, led his team to Dali, Yunnan. They and local experts in Yunnan Province began a five-year follow-up work. In the first step, they carried out life assessments on these villages where sudden death occurred, including Wang Jiacun.

Prior to this, Huang Wenli, deputy director of the Yunnan Provincial Endemic Disease Prevention and Control Institute, led another team to spread a large network. Since 2002, Huang Wenli has compiled a long list of risk factors for this syndrome, including enterovirus infections, drinking mountain streams, drinking alcohol, and eating vegetable oils and mushrooms.

"But no evidence can convince everybody." Liu Jikai said. He is the chief pharmacologist at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and participated in the five-year investigation and evidence collection.

In order to catch the culprit, people tried their best. Initially, Yunnan local experts tended to attribute the cause of death to Keshan disease. In the rugged highlands of northern Yunnan, soil lacks selenium, which is a cause of Keshan disease.

This statement was soon overturned. Researchers in Yunnan found the Coxsackie virus in only four villages. This is a deadly cause of death from Keshan disease. In addition, the heart muscle of patients with Keshan disease can cause organ damage after being affected by Coxsackie virus. Nearly half of the dying hearts “seem to be normal,” and only some of the dead’s hearts showed signs of mild infection.

Not only that, chronic disease such as Keshan disease has developed slowly and there has never been a mass outbreak. More crucially, about two-thirds of the patients who got collective disease occurred between unrelated villagers, so the genetic factors of Keshan disease are less likely to play any role.

Death continues. The stories that Liu Jikai heard were “very frightening”: In the few hours before dying, about two-thirds of the patients showed all kinds of strange symptoms such as palpitations, dizziness, nausea, epilepsy, fatigue, etc. Weird symptoms can't even be classified.

Due to countless unfinished investigations, the villagers have become accustomed to the arrival of these experts. Ancient rumors still spread among villagers. Older villagers will tell the children: In the rainy season from June to August every year, do not go out at a very late time or you will be torn away by the “ghost”.

However, death does not occur only at night. When some villagers talked to people during the day, they fell to the ground and the heart stopped beating.

Hunting killers

When the experts were at a loss, the mysterious “devil” finally left a clue.

In the summer of 2005, local Yunnan researchers sent Zeng Guang and his team a set of heart tissue slides. The pictures are from 3 families. At the same time, the three families each had two deaths.

All evidence points to a deadly arrhythmia, and there are indications that something like a drug or toxin disrupts the balance of the heart. In order to confirm this idea, the experts asked the hospital for the electrocardiograms of the deceased. The electrocardiogram confirmed this suspicion.

In addition, in the 2006 and 2007 surveys, the experts gained another huge discovery. They found a small white mushroom in the home of several families of the deceased. Several other family members of the deceased also admitted that the deceased had eaten this strange little mushroom before his death.

In the summer of 2008, Liu Jikai began to test the toxicity of this small white mushroom.

At first, the experienced pharmacologist did not believe that the white mushrooms were toxic. He and his team entered a forest in northern Yunnan along a less than half meter road. The tall trees grow tall and the sunlight can barely transmit through the lush foliage. These small white mushrooms grow in clusters on dead tree stumps, just like blooming blossoming white flowers.

"It's like a very delicate and lovely girl." Liu Ji opened an analogy. When the small white mushroom is removed from the tree stump, the color changes to a faint light gray.

The scientific experiments that captured the "devil" started here.

Liu Jikai and his team members put on gloves to dip this apparently small white mushroom into alcohol. This particular alcohol is often used for chemical extraction in experiments. He dubbed this process as “bubbling,” and villagers in some small villages in Yunnan often used it to make botanical wines.

After one to three days of “bubbling,” Liu Ji extracted a complex extract from the extracted solvent. This extract was placed in a chemical container and shipped to the Institute of Laboratory Animals of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing.

Some robust mice were selected and housed in experimental cages. The extracts were divided into different doses and fed to these mice as food.

"I think the mouse could not be poisoned." Liu Jikai described his feelings of doubt at the time.

Surprisingly, within 24 hours, the mice died one after another, regardless of the dose swallowed. Before they died, there was a strange symptom. Like epilepsy, they constantly vibrate and have edema and small intestine bleeding.

It turns out that the white mushrooms are poisonous.

Next, Liu Jikai purified all the extracts. He and his team used a chromatographic technique to remove the interfering substances in the extract and extract a toxic compound.

Spectral technology has also been put into use. Liu Ji used electron mass spectrometry to break down the molecules of this compound and used magnetic resonance imaging in spectroscopy to peel off three "odd" amino acids. This kind of amino acid is totally different from the 26 kinds of amino acids the experts usually come into contact with.

In general, most amino acids are composed of proteins, their chemical structures have a fixed pattern, and play an important role in the body's metabolism. However, amino acids extracted from small white mushrooms have nothing to do with any kind of protein. The chemical structure of one of the amino acids is even "brand new."

"Three kinds are poisonous." Liu Jikai said. He can almost already determine who is the "ghost" who visits Yunnan village every year.

Run the killer

Not everyone agrees with this statement. For example, Li Guanghui.

He insisted that the mountain stream was contaminated by toxic substances or pathogens, which was the main cause of this sudden death syndrome. "The vast majority of cases have been drinking dirty water."

The villagers in this area like to drink the natural water in the mountains, although in the opinion of experts, this water has a strange taste.

Liu Jikai also confirmed that not all drowned people have consumed this small white mushroom. The investigators of the investigation team noticed that the heavy metal element plutonium appeared to play a role in the death process. It can cause arrhythmia.

In 2006, the investigation team extracted blood samples from the dead and their families in the two villages where sudden death occurred. Many people have exceeded their standards for deuterium, and one of the deceased has reached a very high level of content. In another sudden death in a group, the deceased's blood, urine, hair, and local water all detected high levels of niobium.

In addition, the ECG data of some sick or healthy villagers also point the finger to the element. It is worth noting that the white mushroom index exceeded the normal level.

Zeng Guang refused to interview the China Youth Daily reporter. After he had hesitated for a long time, he said, "It is not yet fully confirmed." The results will be announced soon. An expert who did not want to be named said that the investigation “accepts certain political pressure”.

So far, Li Linmei, who often put mushrooms in baskets, and some villagers do not want to believe that the white mushrooms caused sudden death. In these small villages in Yunnan's highlands, wild mushrooms are an important source of income for them. The picking season for mushrooms is generally between July and August each year. "Almost all people in the village go mushrooming."

Li Linmei and the villagers often set up simple tents in the mushroom fields and stayed there for several consecutive nights. There will be some middlemen carrying sacks and steelyard scales to collect the mushrooms that the villagers pick up at a low price. These plump and juicy mushrooms will be sold by middlemen to restaurants or exported abroad. Matsutake on the Japanese table, boletus and dried mushrooms in European hotels are mostly produced in Yunnan.

Only the small white mushroom, because it has no commercial value, has become the only mushroom that the poor villagers can eat. No villagers can name the mushroom exactly, although they have lived in the village for many years.

No matter what, a sport is launched. From June 2009, experts from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and local Yunnan researchers went deep into these isolated small villages. They distributed some health pamphlets to the villagers. They printed pictures of the white mushrooms and marked them with red crosses. Valley tweeters began broadcasting without interruption, persuading the villagers not to consume this small white mushroom.

It seems that the devil was temporarily driven away. After Liu Jikai told the China Youth Daily reporter that the propaganda was carried out, the 2010 rainy season began, and the cases of mass deaths in these villages “have hardly occurred again”.

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