Health professionals yesterday warned not to eat wild mushrooms that have grown due to recent heavy rains, as they could cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, diarrhea and potentially kidney failure.
After continuous heavy rain in recent days, people in Kaohsiung’s Fongshan District (鳳山) discovered that wild mushrooms were growing on the central median along Fongnan Road.
Many people rushed to check out the phenomenon, disrupting traffic on the road.
Photo courtesy of the Kaohsiung Police Department
Local police removed the mushrooms overnight yesterday to maintain traffic safety and ensure that people did not eat them.
According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 33 people have been poisoned from eating wild mushrooms in the past five years.
Most of them mistook poisonous ones for edible mushrooms due to their similar appearance, the FDA said.
Taichung Veterans General Hospital Department of Toxicology director Mao Yen-chiao (毛彥喬) said yesterday that people should not eat wild mushrooms at random.
If symptoms appear within six hours of ingesting poisonous mushrooms, people are more likely to promptly seek medical attention, but if symptoms do not appear until after six hours, the situation is usually more serious, Mao said.
The most common type of poisonous mushroom is the green-spored parasol, which can cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, bloody stool and dehydration within one to three hours after ingestion, Mao said.
It is most dangerous to eat multiple kinds of wild mushrooms at once, the doctor said.
He recounted a case in which a patient picked an entire bag of wild mushrooms and developed severe food poisoning about 10 hours after eating them.
The patient was brought to the hospital with renal failure and underwent dialysis for treatment, he said.
Mao said that wild mushroom poisoning is usually acute and there is no direct treatment.
In most cases, only the symptoms can be treated by replenishing electrolytes and prescribing medication to relieve diarrhea, abdominal pain and vomiting, he said.
The FDA said that Taiwan’s humid and rainy subtropical climate is ideal for many types of mushrooms to grow, especially in mountainous areas, farmland, grasslands and bamboo forests after it rains.
People should make sure not to pick or eat wild mushrooms, and not to give them as gifts, to avoid accidentally ingesting poisonous mushrooms, the FDA said.
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