Mass poisonings - Africa and India

Alcohol can kill, especially it it’s laced with crocodile bile, or other lethal additives. In Mozambique, 69 people, including apparently a toddler, have died after drinking home-made beer, ironically, at a funeral.

Health officials believe contamination with crocodile bile made the drink lethal. The woman who brewed it and a number of her relatives are dead, and another 39 people are being treated in hospital.

Meanwhile in India, at least 29 people have died in Uttar Pradesh after drinking toxic liquor at a cricket match, and 100 more are in hospital. Some have lost their sight. Doctors say the drink may have been adulterated with cheap, but dangerous, methyl alcohol. The owner of the shop that sold it has been arrested.

Poisonings of this kind are depressingly common in India. Nearly 170 people died in 2011 in West Bengal, 107 in Gujarat in 2009, and 30 in Uttar Pradesh in the same year.

India school meal poisoning - now a teachers' boycott

Following the poisoning of 23 schoolchildren in the Indian state of Bihar by a contaminated free school meal (see my blog of July 18), teachers in the state have announced they are boycotting the lunch service.

After the deaths, students at a school in the Nawada district of Bihar beat up their teachers, complaining about the quality of the food. Meanwhile it has been revealed that high levels of an agricultural pesticide was found in the fatal lunch dispensed in the village of Dharmasati Gandaman.

The authorities say they are still trying to find the school principal who is wanted on suspicion of criminal negligence.

About 120 million children in 1.2 million schools benefit from the free meals scheme, but teachers complain about corruption and poor quality food. The state says it cannot afford to hire other workers to implement the scheme.

Mass poisonings

Up to 90 people have been poisoned by illicit home-made banana gin in Uganda. The drink, much in demand among those who can’t afford commercial alcohol, had in this case been laced with methanol, which is used in anti-freeze. It causes blindness, coma and death.

Between 1990 and 1992, about 300 children died from kidney failure in Bangladesh, after being given paracetamol syrup laced with diethylene glycol, a solvent which is also used in brake fluid. In 2007, the same chemical was responsible for up to 365 deaths in Panama from contaminated cough medicine.

One of the worst mass poisonings took place in Iraq in the early 1970’s. After a series of poor harvests, stocks of grain had become dangerously low, and the authorities imported nearly 100,000 tons of foreign seed, which they insisted should be treated with a mercury fungicide – highly effective, but highly poisonous.

The seed was coloured bright pink, and carried warnings – in English or Spanish – not much use to most Iraqis. Unaware of the danger, many people used it to make bread, which was often reported as tasting delicious, but altogether about 100,000 people were poisoned, with 6,000 dying. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

* Thanks to the Daily Mirror for quoting me on the Icelandic volcano eruption even if they didn’t get the story exactly right – see my comment. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/04/16/volcanic-ash-cloud-almost-wiped-out-the-human-race-in-1973-115875-22190307/