JIST

Abstract

Since time immemorial, mushrooms have been used as a part of human diet, some of them are very well known for their nutritive and medicinal properties and some are known to cause poisoning to the human body. Number of post ingestion fatalities due to poisonous mushrooms has been reported worldwide. Often, these poisonous mushrooms are misidentified as edible ones which accounts for accidental poisoning and rarely homicidal. The most common mushroom genera which are majorly responsible for poisoning are Amanita, Galerina, Lepiota, Conocybe, Cortinarius. This article briefly presents the exposure pathways and toxicokinetics, mechanism of toxicity, clinical signs and symptoms, treatment, autopsy findings and histopathological examination along with their analysis according to forensic casework samples of commonly encountered poisonous mushrooms throughout the world.