Six persons died in Vijayawada on Monday after consuming liquor laced with Methyl Alcohol.
This is not a one-off incident as deaths due to spurious liquor are all too common in India. While inability to save lives could reflect lack of readiness of hospitals in treating such patients, the irony is that the antidote for spurious liquor happens to be the pure form of ethyl alcohol.
Public health experts here in Hyderabad maintain that methanol or methyl alcohol (CH3OH) is the most common form of alcohol that is used to spike illicit or spurious liquor. And, the antidote for victims happens to be ethyl alcohol (C2H5OH), albeit not the alcohol that is available in stores but in its purest form, which every laboratory and hospital worth its salt must stock.
Side effects
Even 5 millilitres of methyl alcohol is enough to make one go blind, and anything more than 10 ml is quite often fatal. Some of the other side effects of Methanol include metabolic acidosis, a condition in which the body tends to produce a lot of acid and kidneys fail to remove or flush them put of the body.
“Giving pure form of ethyl alcohol is the simplest antidote for methanol-based poisoning. In fact, a couple of months ago, we had treated a patient who was admitted here due to spurious liquor. Of course, the healthcare workers who are attending such patients should be trained about dosage and treatment mechanism. There is a need to have a standard operating procedure or a protocol to treat such patients,” says president-elect, Indian Society for Nephrology, Dr. Pradeep Deshpande.
If nothing works, spurious liquor patients can be kept on dialysis, which goes a long way in removing the tainted blood.
