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
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
346 points (98.3% liked)
World News
39385 readers
2261 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News [email protected]
Politics [email protected]
World Politics [email protected]
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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
load more comments
(1 replies)
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?
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?
load more comments
(2 replies)
Tbf the middle photo is a bit of a paralysis demon.
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.
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...
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
For fermented drinks, yeah, but not necessarily true for distillates.
load more comments
(4 replies)
That's true for beers, wines, etc., but not for liquor, which is what I mentioned. Liquor being anything that is distilled.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
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.
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
I thought it would be like a cool backpacker, maybe some Bourdain energy to him.
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.
Locals cared, obviously.
view more: next ›