At least 54 people have died in Peru over the past month after they consumed bottled drinks containing methanol, a toxic form of alcohol, the South American country's health ministry said Monday.
Oct 18, 2022
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Methanol was found in the blood of the 21 teenagers who died last month in a bar in South Africa's city of East London, according to a health official. Methanol—often called wood alcohol—is a toxic chemical and if ingested ...
Jul 19, 2022
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All alcohol-based hand sanitizers from Mexico have been put on "import alert" until their safety can be assessed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says.
Jan 28, 2021
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(HealthDay)—Federal health officials have been warning for weeks that illegal forms of hand sanitizer containing toxic methanol are being sold across the United States.
Aug 5, 2020
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(HealthDay)—The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to use alcohol-based hand sanitizers containing methanol, or wood alcohol, which is used in fuel and antifreeze and is toxic if absorbed through ...
Jul 28, 2020
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The death toll in Siberia from people drinking bath essence containing methanol rose to 71 Thursday, the Russian health ministry said.
Dec 22, 2016
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When it comes to the sort of beneficial mutations that drive natural selection, there's new evidence that, evolutionarily speaking, timing is everything.
Mar 20, 2013
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A batch of home-brewed liquor thought to have been laced with the highly toxic chemical methanol has killed 143 people in eastern India, an official told AFP on Thursday.
Dec 15, 2011
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Methanol, also known as methyl alcohol, wood alcohol, wood naphtha or wood spirits, is a chemical with the formula CH3OH (often abbreviated MeOH). It is the simplest alcohol, and is a light, volatile, colorless, flammable liquid with a distinctive odor very similar to, but slightly sweeter than, ethanol (drinking alcohol). At room temperature, it is a polar liquid, and is used as an antifreeze, solvent, fuel, and as a denaturant for ethanol. It is also used for producing biodiesel via transesterification reaction.
Methanol is produced naturally in the anaerobic metabolism of many varieties of bacteria, and is ubiquitous in the environment. As a result, there is a small fraction of methanol vapor in the atmosphere. Over the course of several days, atmospheric methanol is oxidized with the help of sunlight to carbon dioxide and water.
Methanol burns in air, forming carbon dioxide and water:
Because of its toxic properties, methanol is frequently used as a denaturant additive for ethanol manufactured for industrial uses — this addition of methanol exempts industrial ethanol from liquor excise taxation. Methanol is often called wood alcohol because it was once produced chiefly as a byproduct of the destructive distillation of wood.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
