Safer to be a vegetarian--but don't eat the false truffles!

"Wild boars roam Czech forests - and some of them are radioactive!"

from Wikimedia Commons--Jerzy Strzelecki

PRAGUE: "The Czech Republic has an unusual problem this winter with its wild boar meat, a local delicacy. The boars are radioactive.

Actually, it's not the boars themselves, but what they're eating. A cold and snowy winter is forcing them to feed on false truffles, an underground mushroom common in the Sumava mountain region shared by Czechs, Austrians, Germans - and wild boars."

False truffle: Daniel B. Wheeler (Tuberale) at Mushroom Observer, from Wikipedia

"The mushrooms can absorb high levels of the radioactive isotope Caesium 137. And three decades ago the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl released a fair amount of Caesium 137 that eventually drifted down on the Sumava mountains."

Chernobyl, a city in Ukraine after the 1986 nuclear fires that released radioactivity into the air

The radioactivity that was released into the air more than thirty years ago has settled into the soil of the Czech Republic's Sumava district, 1000 miles away. An underground mushroom (false truffle) grows, picking up the radioactivity; then an animal eats the mushroom; then a person eats the animal, and a very small amount of radioactivity goes into the person.

For the entire article, go to http://www.reuters.com/article/us-czech-boars-idUSKBN1611G0 


(Reporting by Robert Muller and Jiri Skacel, editing by Larry King)