Three hours after Dr. Todd Mitchell’s Dec. 3 flight from Beijing landed in San Francisco, a call demanded his immediate attention. Mitchell, 59, had spent two-and-a-half weeks in China, which has the most mushroom poisoning deaths in the world, sharing the treatment method he developed at Dominican Hospital. The call concerned a Santa Rosa hospital patient believed to have eaten deadly mushrooms. Principal investigator of an amatoxin mushroom poisoning clinical trial that has treated nearly 100 patients across North America in the past 10 years, Mitchell arranged for the patient’s overnight transfer to Dominican Hospital. This patient was the first...