Experts teach you how to identify poisonous wild mushroom

As mushroom season coming, in order to promote consumers’ awareness of identifying wild mushrooms, an activity to popularize mushroom knowledge was held in Yunnan Shuimuhua Wild Mushroom Trading Center. Through distributing brochures, on-site explanation, cooking demonstration and other ways, consumers absorbed recognition methods and cooking skills of mushroom.

Yunnan is known as the “Kingdom of mushroom” with 2,729 species of mushroom, accounting for 56.9% of China’s total. Among them, there are more than 160 species having important ecological, economic and development value. The annual sales volume of edible mushroom in Yunnan is about 500,000 tons, which has been exported to over 40 countries, such as Japan, Italy, French, UK, etc. It has been estimated that the market has exceed 100 billion yuan in value.

Not only people in Yunnan are keen to wild mushroom, but in recent years, it gradually becomes popular with tourists. According to Tang Liping, who works in Kunming Medical University, there are many species of wild mushroom with similar morphological characteristics, and it is difficult to accurately identify them except for professionals.

Here comes some advice about eating mushroom. Do not eat unfamiliar mushrooms, and do not overeat at a time. Do not drink alcohol when eating mushroom because it can produce toxic components, resulting in poisoning. The symptoms of poisoning are complex and diverse, and the common response of most of them is gastroenteritis, with nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea. In addition, neurological poisoning may result in hallucinations, insanity and others. There are also liver injury and hemolysis poisoning types. 

Once food poisoning occurs, you should throw up as soon as possible and go to the hospital to have a gastric lavage. It had better to bring the mushroom samples, and contact professionals to identify for further diagnosis and treatment.