The Department of Health reported yesterday a bottle of rice wine sent for testing contained more than 290,000 parts per million (ppm) of methanol, 290 times higher than the legal limit of 1,000ppm.
"Nearly 30 percent of the bottle was made of methanol," said Chen Lu-hung (
Chen said ingesting more than 30ml of methanol could be lethal.
Chen said it was highly likely that industrial alcohol was added to the wine during the manufacturing process because only industrial alcohol could contain such a high level of methanol.
Another bottle tested contained 90,000ppm of methanol, according to the health department.
"These two bottles were both from Hualien County. They were sent to the department on Nov. 30," Chen said. "The people who sent the bottles said they made the wine on their own, but later they said the wines were gifts from friends."
Chen said the Hualien County Government is investigating the source of the two bottles.
The DOH launched a free testing program for rice wine on Nov. 26.
By Tuesday, more than 5,200 bottles had been submitted to local health departments for testing and 287 were found to have excessive levels of methanol.
The DOH is conducing a second round of tests on the suspect bottles and had completed tests on 203 of them as of Tuesday. It found that only 17 bottles actually contained excessive levels of methanol.
Six of the 17 had come from Ilan. The DOH said all six were produced by unauthorized factories. Of the other 11 bottles, four came from Hualien, while the others came from Taichung, Tainan, Pingtung and Penghu.
DOH statistics show that there have been 10 fatalities since rice wine poisoning cases were first reported in Ilan in the middle of last month.
The department said yesterday that six of those fatalities were caused by methanol poisoning. The cause of death in the other four is still being investigated.
Eight of the 10 deaths took place in Ilan, with one in Nantou and the other in Tainan.
Thirteen people poisoned by rice wine remain hospitalized.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not