When You Can't Trust the Beer, What Can You Trust?

It used to be you couldn’t drink the water but you could drink the beer. But not in Mozambique:

Three more people have died from drinking contaminated beer, bringing the number of fatalities to 72, as the number hospitalized fell by more than 150, health authorities in Mozambique said on Tuesday. About 35 victims are now hospitalized, down from 196, according Paula Bernardo, director of health, women and social welfare in the northeastern Tete province. At least seven people are still in critical condition in hospitals in the Chitima district, Bernardo told Radio Mozambique.

Dozens of people fell ill in Chitima and in the neighboring Songo district after drinking traditional beer, known as Pombe, at a funeral over the weekend. The beer, brewed from millet or corn flour, is believed to have been poisoned with crocodile bile, according to district health officials.

Crocodile bile? Snopes says it’s a myth:

Crocodile bile, like bat whiskers, the hair of a black cat, a pinch of gargoyle sweat, eye of newt, and troll teeth, does not appear to be deadly on its own.

Forbes takes a longer look at this urgent and pressing matter:

Professor Nyazema hypothesized that the traditional descriptions of this poison might be consistent with a toxic plant that may have been added to the brew in witchcraft practices. Nyazema seized on the observation that the chemical structure of bile acids are not that far removed from plant-derived cardiac glycosides, drugs like digoxin (Lanoxin) that are still used to aid patients with heart failure and some types of heart rhythm disturbances.

The cardiac glycosides, commonly called digitalis for the mixed plant extract, have a low therapeutic index – meaning that there’s a small margin between the beneficial therapeutic dose and the toxic dose. Plants like foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) are commonly found in southeastern Africa having escaped cultivation from European colonists, but Nyazema also lists 11 other species of local plants that contain similar cardiac glycosides.

While high doses of cardiac glycosides will obviously slow the heartbeat to zero, nausea, vomiting, abdominal discomfort, and diarrhea are among the coincident signs of cardiac glycoside poisoning. These are also consistent with the minimal descriptions provided by Mozambique health authorities.

I’ll have a Heineken, thanks.