Four locals from Duc Trong District were taken to the Lam Dong Provincial General Hospital with symptoms of fatigue, shortness of breath and loss of motor control after eating some Angel’s trumpets, a kind of flower widely grown in the Central Highlands of Da Lat City and neighboring areas.

The patients, Le Van Tay and Le Cong Dien, both 63, and Nguyen Thanh Cong, 21 are out of danger while Nguyen Thanh Phat, 19, still has symptoms of hallucination. Tay said he plucked around 20 yellow Angel’s trumpet flowers to be boiled for lunch.

“I tasted the raw petals and they were as sweet as pumpkin flowers. I thought they were edible so I took some for lunch,” he added.

According to Doctor Phan Thach Khue, vice head of the hospital’s Resuscitation and Anti-poison Department, the kind of flower with three common colors of white, yellow and red has atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine compounds which are used in medical anesthesia and could be poisonous. He added 2 years ago, his hospital received a patient who was hospitalized with dizziness after smelling a white Angel’s trumpet.