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.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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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.
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".
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 drink 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
When locals were dying from it nobody cared.
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.
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.