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.
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