Yet another 6 people have lost their lives after drinking home-made alcohol. This time 4 Iranians died in Southern Iran and another 298 people were poisoned.
Nine of the people poisoned are now in a coma and have lost their vision and an additional 100 are on dialysis after drinking the home-made concoction last week.
All of the victims were males under the age of 27 years old and it is thought that Iran’s law banning alcohol is the cause of the poisoning because people make their own alcohol at home illegally.
The consumption of alcohol has been outlawed in the country since 1979 and anyone caught violating the laws can be imprisoned or lashed. Only certain communities within the country are allowed to discreetly make and consume alcohol in order to not offend Islamic traditionalists.
According to reports around 60 to 80 million litres of alcohol are smuggled into Iran every year and countless amounts are made illegal at home.
Surprisingly despite the country’s law, there are thousands of alcoholics living in Iran who fuel the home made alcohol industry. Home distilled spirits are cheaper than foreign imported alcohols but the use of poisonous industrial chemicals in its production can prove fatal.
This post from LasVegasSun.com details what happened:
Six Iranians have died and 348 have been sickened after drinking poisonous alcohol in the southeastern Kerman province.
The semi-official ISNA news agency on Saturday quoted a medical official, Dr. Hamid Najmeddin, as saying that three people remained in critical condition at the hospital’s intensive care unit.
Najmeddin says 67 others were also in hospital in the provincial capital of Rafsanjan. He says 75 people poisoned in Rafsanjan and 109 sickened elsewhere in Kerman province had to undergo dialysis but were later released from hospital.
Most had consumed the bad alcohol on Wednesday.
Drinking alcohol is illegal and considered sinful under Islamic law in Iran. However, homemade brews tend to be cheap and available on the black market.
Source: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/jun/01/ml-iran-alcohol-poisoning/#axzz2V3tj69xX
Anyone travelling abroad should be aware of the dangers of illegally produced alcohol. Just recently a British woman died while backpacking through the Indonesian jungle because of poisoned alcohol which she had bought from a shop in the jungle. Incidents like this are not uncommon in developing countries because it is cheaper to produce alcohol using industrial chemicals.
Even though it is unlikely that we will encounter fake alcohol in Oz, we should still be careful when purchasing alcohol, especially when travelling overseas make sure you know what you’re drinking and that you are buying a sealed bottle from a reputable place.
The substances the criminals usually make fake alcohol with are poisonous, including chemicals such as cleaning fluids, nail polish remover, isopropanol and methanol. People are often fooled by these fakes because they give off the same feeling as normal alcohol at first, but it’s only a matter of time before the effects turn bad, usually starting with a loss of eye sight.