Many refugees from Syria got poisoned by mushrooms because a common edible Syrian mushroom looks very much like a poisonous German mushroom.
Happens to some SE Asians in North America too, because the edible straw mushroom from SE Asia resembles one here called “death cap”. Amanita phalloides. What’s fucked up is right before it kills you your symptoms actually improve, so people get discharged from the hospital and think they are going to be ok. I forage mushrooms but I stay away from white gilled mushrooms completely.
Yeah I had my yard full of destroying angels last summer, when they first showed up I was all “sweet! Mushrooms!” Because they look real similar to agaricus. But then I saw the white gills, and was all :(.
And I made sure to tell my kids not to mess with them and why.
Just follow standard survival advice. Don’t forage for mushrooms. Starving to death is better than poisoning yourself and starving to death.
Don’t use mushroom ID apps and don’t trust random guidebooks from Amazon, they’re probably AI-generated crap.
The deadly mycotoxin orellanine, which is present in Cortinarius rubellus, the deadly webcap, may not cause symptoms in those who ingested the mushroom until one or two weeks have passed – after detectable traces of the toxin are already gone, and late-stage kidney failure has already begun. Connecting the sickness with certainty to a misidentified wild mushroom that was eaten weeks earlier with no obvious ill effects is not always possible.
Yeah, nope.
This is basically vegan rabies
