Bottle Gourd, commonly known as lauki, dudhi, or ghiya in India is a popular vegetable in Asia and Africa. Many people like to juice it and drink it as a health drink. Though rare, bottle gourd can be poisonous. Drinking or eating a poisonous fruit can lead to severe bleeding and loss of blood pressure. Depending on how much of the poisonous fruit is ingested, it can lead to death. We have created this website as a way to spread awareness and alert people to check bottle gourd before consuming it.
How to prevent Bottle Gourd Poisoning? The only way to convincingly tell if a fruit or vegetable carries a poisonous chemical is through gas chromatography, which is uneconomical and impractical to keep in households. The quick and easy way to tell if a lauki is poisonous is by tasting it. If it is bitter, one should immediately spit it out, and discard the whole fruit. This is a fairly simple test and should be a habit in kitchens.
Our first goal is to spread awareness and prevent future deaths. Our eventual goal is to promote research into detection of poisonous bottle gourds, and elimination of the generation of Cucurbitacin B, the bitter tasting chemical that causes fruits of the Cucurbitaceae family to be poisonous.
From our experience we can say that doctors do not report food poisoning from poisonous bottle gourds, and hence cases go under-reported. If you share stories of people who have suffered because of poisonous bottle gourds, it will help shed light on the size of the issue. Your stories can be as personal as you wish to tell. The more of us share, the more attention we can all bring to this issue.
A 55-year-old gentleman was referred to our hospital in a state of shock. He was admitted to a nursing home, a day prior, with history of sudden onset
My mother-in-law had only one sip of the juice, while my father-in-law drank a glassful. My mother-in-law survived after five days of intensive care i