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Well known to skiers and alpinistes, Montchavin also has grabbed the attention of medical researchers as the site of a highly unusual cluster of a devastating neurological disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The year-round resident population is only a couple hundred, and neighboring villages aren’t much bigger, so the odds are strongly against finding more than just a few #ALS patients in the immediate area.
Yet physicians have reported 14. (cont'd 
)
None of the Montchavin patients had a family history of #ALS. Of the 12 whose blood was tested, none was positive for an ALS susceptibility gene.
Scientists tested drinking water and garden soil for toxic substances.
They considered a compound that ski resorts add to the water that’s blasted out of the snowmaking machines.
They tested for lead, given the presence of a long-closed lead mine in the vicinity.
They measured household levels of radon.
(cont'd )
Clues surfaced here and there, but the researchers hadn’t discovered any single, obvious risk factor that all the patients had in common.
In 2017, neurologist Emmeline Lagrange and five colleagues summarized their findings in an abstract, “A high-incidence cluster of ALS in the French Alps: common environment and multiple exposures,” making clear that, after eight years, there was no real answer.
Looking back, Lagrange says, “We were at a stop. We had no more ideas.”
(cont'd )
Yet the abstract contained one phrase that would prove pivotal.
Six of the patients, it said, “used to eat local mushrooms.”
Terence Monmaney reports on this morel mystery 
:
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2024/did-eating-false-mushrooms-cause-als-french-village