NAFDAC finds methanol in Ondo herbal drinks after 48 deaths

Nigeria’s food and drug agency said on 19 September that laboratory tests found high concentrations of methanol in locally made herbal and alcoholic drinks linked to 48 deaths and 182 illnesses in Ondo State. Eleven of 15 samples also tested positive for Cannabis indica. Gas chromatography confirmed the methanol. Acute oral toxicity tests on mice left the animals critically ill and killed about half the mice in six of the 15 samples.

NAFDAC Director-General Mojisola Adeyeye signed the update. As of 17 September the agency’s tally was 90 people admitted and discharged, six still in hospital, 31 treated as outpatients, five left totally blind and two partially blind. Symptoms listed by the agency and by Ondo health commissioner Banji Ajaka included headache, weakness, body pain, visual disturbance, difficulty breathing and altered consciousness. Some patients went downhill in hours. Ajaka told the Associated Press that after a sufficient dose “the kidneys will pack up, the eyes will go, the brain will be damaged.”

The first reports in early September put the dead at 31: 20 in Odigbo Town and 11 in Araromi-Obu. Surveillance then pulled in New Town, Odole, Okele, Orita Odigbo, Oniparaga and parts of Irele local government. The dead rose to 48 as those names entered the count. Sola Adebayo, 32, told TVC News from a hospital bed that he took two shots on a Friday and could not see on Saturday.

Ondo police spokesman Abayomi Jimoh said 15 people had been arrested. One of them, police said, was involved in producing substances suspected to contain methanol and was still being questioned. Traders in Odigbo told the AP, on condition they not be named, that a popular high-alcohol herbal drink sold as “Monkey Tail” exists in two versions: one they treat as safe, and one they do not. The unsafe version is the cheaper one. That is the market structure. Methanol is less expensive than ethanol. A seller who stretches a batch can undercut the stall next door and still pour a liquid that looks like the usual bottle.

Drinking informal spirits is common in rural southern Nigeria because the price is lower and the regulator is far away. NAFDAC can test 15 samples after people die. It cannot stand in every courtyard where a drum is mixed. The cannabis finding in 11 samples is a separate adulteration. It does not cause the blindness. Methanol does. The molecule metabolises to formaldehyde and formic acid. The optic nerve and the basal ganglia take the damage first. That is why five people in this cluster will not see again and why two others will see less.

Adeyeye’s statement included a warning that people who recovered might still die if they took a second dose. That sentence is about the samples, not about folklore. The mouse tests showed leftover toxicity. A patient who walked out of DHQ is not cleared to drink the same drum.

The 15 arrests will produce charges or they will not. The more durable fact is the recipe. As long as methanol is available to people who bottle “herbal” alcohol for a village price, Odigbo’s numbers can be repeated in another local government under another brand name. Naming Monkey Tail does not retire the method. It tells the next buyer which stall to fear this month.

Public health responses to methanol clusters are simple on paper and slow on the ground. Pull the stock. Test the barrels. Treat the acidotic patients with ethanol or fomepizole if the hospital has them, and with dialysis if it does not. Tell the radio stations. Ondo has done the counting and the sampling. The gap is the distance between a NAFDAC laboratory and a drum in Oniparaga.

Forty-eight dead is a mass casualty event that arrived as a drink. One hundred and eighty-two cases is a map of who shared the batch. Five total blinds are the permanent record. The agency’s chromatograms are the proof. The next number to watch is whether new cases stop now that the samples are public, or whether another community is already pouring from a related drum.