Beware of this type of mushroom

With the onset of fall, mushroom lovers are dusting off their tools and starting to take long walks in the woods so they can taste this wonderful and tasty fruit of the earth. It is an extremely versatile food that allows us to taste excellent typical dishes of Italian culinary culture. However, we must be extremely careful with what we collect, as there are edible mushrooms and poisonous mushrooms. Let’s see together what poisonous mushrooms are and how to distinguish them.

Poisonous mushrooms can have very negative effects on human health, even to the point of being fatal. It is precisely for this reason that it is necessary to have basic knowledge to recognize toxins and avoid them. There are many varieties and many of them aesthetically resemble mushrooms that are not poisonous. Let’s see them together. Very dangerous are the Amanita Muscaria, well known because they are the type that the Smurfs used as a house. These are the poisonous mushrooms par excellence.

Another harmful fungus is the Armanita Phalloides, known as the angel of death. The name was not randomly assigned, as the high number of toxins it contains can lead to the death of the individual who takes it. Another belonging to the same category is the Armanita Gemmata: this mushroom is very harmful and taken in large quantities can cause death. Fortunately, it has a peculiarity: the yellow hat, which helps us to recognize it and, therefore, to avoid it.

To understand if we have ingested poisonous mushrooms, there are more or less short times in which the symptoms can appear and this obviously depends on the type of mushroom: the time range varies from 30 minutes to 6 hours. When not life-threatening, symptoms are limited to gastrointestinal disturbances. Other times, on the other hand, they present as flu-like gastroenteritis and that is why doctors, confused by the similarity of symptoms, increasingly delay hospital intervention.

For these reasons, experts advise us to ingest mushrooms harvested only by those who have taken the course that provides important knowledge on the subject. If, on the contrary, we realize that we have consumed poisonous mushrooms, the first thing to do is to go to the nearest emergency room and request a gastric lavage, in order to expel all the poisonous toxins ingested with the mushrooms . Experts would like to point out that if after 36 hours you continue to experience symptoms, you may be facing kidney failure and, therefore, dialysis.