Health: pharmacy students trained to recognize toxic species of mushrooms

Nothing beats the field to learn to recognize mushrooms. Future pharmacists review the basics, to learn to recognize poisons and edibles. Appearance, color, every detail counts for each species. “Hat [du champignon] from the outside, we look at how it is made, is it flaky (…) and we can also smell“, details a student.

Autumn is the ideal season for this open-air course, intended for around 40 pharmacy students. “The identification of mushrooms as plants is part of the pharmacist’s repository, and it is therefore an obligation (…) to know the toxic mushrooms“, explains Serge Krivobokprofessor and doctor of pharmacy. Of 3,000 species, only a hundred are edible. In 2021more than 1,200 poisonings, including four fatal cases, have been recorded in France.