Officials: Jimsonweed turned potato stew into poison stew

Friday, July 11, 2008

Officials: Jimsonweed turned potato stew into poison stew

by Patricia M. Murret | Staff Writer

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Health authorities confirmed Friday that the six Gaithersburg residents who were admitted to a hospital Wednesday with hallucinations, nausea, and heart palpitations were poisoned after they ate jimsonweed.

The toxic plant was mixed into a homemade potato stew the six ate at a family dinner on Tuesday, a Montgomery County health department spokeswoman said. An elderly family member made the stew using plants from the family herb garden. Twelve people attended the dinner, and the six people who ate the stew got sick.

County fire and rescue officials initially reported that the sick may have been poisoned by mint leaves tainted with pesticides.

That changed Thursday after two experts from the county’s disease control program and a botanist went to the family’s townhome in the Montgomery Meadows Townhouses on the 1000 block of Travis Lane, off Watkins Mill Road, said Mary Anderson, a spokeswoman for the county’s department of Health and Human Services. They found recently cut jimsonweed in the garden, which surprised the botanist, who said the plant is usually found on farmland and in fields, Anderson said.

Then the experts went inside.

‘‘In the trash can were not only potato peels but more clippings of jimsonweed and they thought ‘A-ha!’” Anderson said.

Jimsonweed contains belladonna alkaloids atropine and scopolamine, ingredients that may cause symptoms such as: mental confusion, agitation, rapid heart rate, incoherent speech, impaired coordination, rapid heartbeat, dry, flushed or hot skin, visual or auditory hallucinations or cardiac arrest, Anderson said.

Satnam Singh, a relative who lives next door, said his 18-year-old son attended the dinner. The six who ate the stew began hallucinating one half-hour after eating the stew, he said.

‘‘They were acting wild and everything, like hallucinating, they didn’t know what they were saying, what they were doing, talking all kind of nonsense,” Singh said. ‘‘The ones who didn’t eat, like the kids, noticed.” His son described his sick relatives, who ranged in age from 10 to 70 years old as behaving ‘‘like when you’re high on pot,” he said. He noticed that ‘‘they were not breathing properly” and called a friend to the home who called the ambulance, Singh said.

‘‘Everyone is doing much better right now. Most of them should be released from the hospital [Friday],” he said.

Anderson said that jimsonweed does not resemble mint. Instead, the weed, also known as ‘‘Downy thornapple” and ‘‘Devil’s trumpet” can grow to 5 feet tall and has ‘‘coarsely serrated” 3- to 8-inch leaves according to www.ansci.cornell.edu⁄plants, a Web site that contains the Cornell University poisonous plants database.

‘‘You really have to be careful,” she said. When it comes to eating homegrown herbs, ‘‘don’t eat anything that you haven’t planted yourself and know exactly what it is.”