Summary
Holly Bowles, a 19-year-old Australian, has become the sixth foreign tourist to die from suspected methanol poisoning in Laos.
She and her friend Bianca Jones fell ill in Vang Vieng, a popular backpacking town, after reportedly consuming tainted alcohol, which can be lethal even in small amounts.
Other victims include a British lawyer, an American man, and two Danish women. Methanol, often found in bootleg or home-distilled alcohol, is believed to be the cause.
Authorities are investigating, with the manager of the hostel where free shots were served detained for questioning.
It’s amusing that out of the few articles I’ve seen it’s only been pictures of girls. There’s no way that old backpacker dude or a friggin lawyer didn’t have photos. I can go digging I guess but I was just mildly curious what people who traveled and drank at these places looked like.
RELEASE THE UGLY OLD MAN PICS
You know in eastern europe they teach you to only drink something from people you know, because if it has methanol at least the last thing you drank was some good shit. On a serious note, isnt there a way for testing for methanol? And if there is why dont people do it? This of course doesnt work in very poor places but why dont they make it required by law in european countries and then suddenly all the homebrew you can get wont kill you.
Do you realise how fucking regulated alcohol making and indeed, any sort of food or beverage making is in Europe? This sort of shit only happens in countries where you have a deadly mixture of ignorance, poverty and corruption.
Farmers in rural France know you throw away the first part of the moonshine because it’s the part that makes you go blind, for example. And it’s precisely to prevent any sort of accidental mishaps they ended up forbidding the making of it anyway (it used to be allowed for cattle farmers, iirc). Although I believe they rolled back that one, what with the explosion of microbreweriea and such. Also if it’s legal can tax it.
Idk in hungary there was basically no regulation(or anything they followed anyway). Of course hungary is a shithole so this may be just a result of that.
Before the Russians went full stupid, they would bring illegal booze across the border into Poland and most of it should have been poured into a fuel tank.
You can test for methanol in various ways during destillation. But also you don’t need to test for it, if you control your temperature properly and discard a sufficient amount at the beginning.
Even if you would not discard anything, if you fill all your destillate in one container, so ethanol and methanol mix again, it decreases the effectiveness of the methanol.
Methanol itself is not directly toxic. The damage is done by formaldehyde and formic acid that come from your body metabolising the methanol. Methanol gets metabolized on the same routes as ethanol, which the body favors. So one way to treat methanol poisoning is by ingesting untainted ethanol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_poisoning
All fermented drinks contain both ethanol and methanol. But because the ratio is not altered with bad distillation, you wont get methanol poisoning from untainted beer or wine.
The only quick and easy way I know is to burn it in a dark room. If you get a pure blue flame you’re good. But if it’s at all orange, it needs another go through the still.
These are one of those situations that absolutely can devastate a tourist destination.
It’s not just international eyes on their government. But also, news spreading that something is killing tourists will quickly turn into a panic and people traveling there. Because first, it’s “just alcohol”.
Other victims include 2 women, a man, and… a lawyer?
Yeah, in Laos there are no enbys, just men, women, and the profession
Silver lining…
Never drink booze that you don’t know the origin of. And never drink homemade liquor unless it’s made by someone who is otherwise a professional using professional grade equipment. It’s just not worth the risk. By the time you feel the effects of the methanol, it’s too late in a majority of cases.
With my wife we drank a shoot of artisan cachaza in Rio de Janeiro once, it was really tasty but got us drunk on the spot and the next day we had the worst hangover we can remember. Artisans cachazas are kinda common om Rio, but never again, it’s not worth It.
Homemade alcohol being deadly because of methanol is a myth. If you just look at what ingredients you put it, it’s clear the amount of methanol is too small to be deadly.
This is almost always someone cutting their booze with cheap methanol.
That’s true for beers, wines, etc., but not for liquor, which is what I mentioned. Liquor being anything that is distilled.
Distillation does not magically add methanol. If you simply look at the ingredients, it’s fairly clear that it would be very hard to ferment a deadly amount of ethanol.
Maybe if they added tons of wood and leaves and used high pectine fruits? I guess it’s a possibility, but still seems unlikely.
For fermented drinks, yeah, but not necessarily true for distillates.
Not sure what you’re talking about, distillates are distilled fermented drinks, the methanol content doesn’t magically change.
You can’t get more methanol by distilling. Yes it’ll be more concentrated, unless you’re throwing a ton of leaves and wood, I’m not sure where any significant amount would come from. I think possibly high pectine fruits could prove dangerous, but not sure about that.
The concentration is the problem.
It shouldn’t be, the amount should still be pretty insignificant…
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Except when it isn’t. If the price of the locally fermented alcohol is lower than the price of imported methanol (not every country has a chemical industry and some of those countries have a really low GNP), then it’s just not going to be the case. And since there have been methanol contaminations in such countries, we know with certainty that it isn’t always caused by adding methanol.
Some scientists heard the same argument (that it was added methanol), thought that wouldn’t always make sense and then did some research: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5028366/
“This study assessed some traditional fermented beverages and found that some beverages are prone to methanol contamination including cachaca, cholai, agave, arak, plum and grape wines.”
You could technically drink it, but accompanied by other alcohol you know the source of. I have no idea about the proportion needed to make it safe.
I wouldn’t chance it tho.
Methanol? 10ml will blind you and 30ml will kill you.
Pretty white spoiled girls “yay let’s go to a third world country where 13 people live for a week on the cost of my hair dye!”
Like I’m sorry but maybe give your head a shake you idiots. You look like a tv star and these people live on pennies. How far up you ass is your own head? How stupid and naive can you possibly be? Of course they are going to take what you have and/or kill you.
Third world gonna third world.
you’re tripping. third world countries arent some lawless wastelands full of hopeless zombies like you seem to imagine.
Tourist money is a good thing for poor countries you delusional fuckwit.
Methanol poisoning is a very bad way to kill someone for their belongings
Feel like this needs to be said. If they weren’t pretty young blonde women from Australia, this wouldn’t be hitting the headlines as much as it is
Maybe we just consider it a sacrifice of a few beautiful people to help make things safer for the rest of us.
Possibly. But why does this need to be said? How is it relevant here? What does it offer?
Because it calls out the blatant hypocrisy. Why the pushback?
Because stating that people are biased for beauty and youth and western, predominantly white media are biased for whiteness, is like saying that the sky is blue. It adds nothing and detracts from the story, which is more about the excessive drinking culture in youth, backpacking, thrill-seeking, Southeast Asia, and a host more closely related topics. Noticing that the faces on the BBC heading are pretty blonde girls and making an issue of it is anything but deep. It is the most superficial thing you could notice and comment on, bordering on creepy, because you reduce a story to “pretty blondes”. If and when you suspect that an important story is buried because its protagonists are not conventionally attractive or because of their race or gender identity, then do bring it up. Then you are helping elevate people whose stories perhaps should be told and heard more widely.
Tbf the middle photo is a bit of a paralysis demon.
Yes, this happens with some regularity. Usually during wedding season (dry season) and at large funerals. The reason it’s in the news is what you said.
Search any of the local news sites for ‘alcohol poisoning’ in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and you will have a lot of results.
Why wouldn’t the bbc and Australian media cover the deaths by misfortune of citizens from their home country
Well of course they would. It’s just unusual that the victims weren’t local.
Also goes for stories covering children, too.
As an aside, I always wondered if the opposite rings true in countries where the minority is white. Ethnocentrism?
Isnt the antidote actual ethanol?
Yes, but you need to drink untainted alcohol in huge quantities to give your liver something to do instead of killing you. When you don’t know, you drink in moderation, or worse each following drink has more methanol in it. You might be fucked before you even realize what’s going on, and even with a doctor in the room it’s not immediately obvious what’s happening.
Ah, cruel Fate
Yeah methanol poisoning is no joke. Huge warning signs on cisterns saying “contaminated with methanol” yet people will still try to steal it for drinking and end up blind or dead. Usually doesn’t make the news since yaknow, stupidity and ignoring obvious warning signs.
The preferred antidote is fomepizole together with hemodialysis.
Fomepizole works by blocking the enzyme that converts methanol and ethylene glycol to their toxic breakdown products.[4]
Didn’t hospitals just used to keep a bottle of whiskey in the med supply closet before this stuff was developed?
Any poison can be medicine at the right dose and any medicine can be a poison at the wrong dose. There’s probably a very long list of aliments that ethanol can treat.
I heard of it as an emergency stopgap measure until you can make it to the hospital to get pumped out and properly treated. But it’s been a while, I could misremember
You can stomach pump some out, but it’s not going to grab anything that’s already in your blood stream. Ethanol is still used as an internal treatment for methanol poisoning.
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When locals were dying from it nobody cared.
Locals cared, obviously.
Locals don’t drink cocktails. They drink lao-lao or beer.
Local events don’t tend to make international news in general, regardless of where it happens.
Nor really, we are inundated with local news from the US all the time that are nor even relevant for the US national population.
