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.
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.
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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