Toxic Fungi of Western North America
Mushroom poisoning case registry
In present day poisonings, permission of the patient to release all data to the North American Mycological Association (NAMA) is very important. Currently, patient confidentiality is a hot medical-legal topic and has lead to new and often absurd rules. The chief of the emergency department refused the author's request to review the records of a hospital patient that he had seen a week earlier in its emergency room: the grounds being that this hospitals' former staff president was no longer an active member of the staff and the patient had not signed a separate release of information for outside consultation. (That refusal included the author's own notes!) The Poison Control staff relayed the needed information to the author the following week and the matter was never referred to higher authorities.
NAMA mushroom poisoning report forms are available on NAMA's web site http://www.namyco.org.