Mushroom-poisoned Afghan boy to undergo liver transplant

Doctors at Poland’s main children’s hospital are planning to carry out a liver transplant on a 6-year-old Afghan boy who ate poisonous mushrooms with his family. On Tuesday, the family said that his 5-year-old brother is in a coma and near death.

Recently, the boys and their older sister were evacuated from Afghanistan. They were hospitalized last week. The family picked and ate highly poisonous death cap mushrooms in the forest near the refugee centre where they were staying in Podkowa Lesna, near Warsaw.

The Associated Press reported that the doctors at the Center for Children’s Health Institute said the older brother is to undergo a transplant on Tuesday. The report further said that he remains in a life-threatening condition. The younger brother is undergoing tests to see if he is brain dead.

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Their 17-year-old sister is in stable condition at the hospital, as are other family members, who were hospitalized elsewhere.

Earlier, Poland evacuated the family from Afghanistan at Britain’s request after the Taliban takeover. The father had worked for the British in Afghanistan.

Death cap mushrooms are among those poisonous mushrooms in the world. They closely resembled Poland’s popular, edible parasol mushroom.

In another incident at a different centre near Warsaw, four Afghan men were hospitalized after eating poisonous mushrooms, according to the state Office for Foreigners. One of them has improved and was released from hospital.

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On Monday, the United States completed its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. While nearly 6,000 US troops were busy carrying out an evacuation process over the past weeks, there was another task at hand that needed to be completed: the disabling of scores of US aircraft and armored vehicles as well as a high-tech rocket defense system at the Hamiz Karzai International Airport in Kabul.

The US also left behind the C-RAM system that was used to protect the Kabul airport from rocket attacks. Following a suicide bombing that killed over 110 people, including 13 US troops, the airport was under attack on Sunday again as the missile defence system intercepted five rockets that were fired overnight.

(With inputs from The Associated Press)