Death by Lychee Poisoning

[Randy W]

This was actually a problem in India - from the NY Times

 

Dangerous Fruit: Mystery of Deadly Outbreaks in India Is Solved

 

 

 

Every year in mid-May, as temperatures reached scorching heights, parents took children who had been healthy the night before to the hospital. The children awakened with a high-pitch cry in the early morning, many parents said.

Then the youths began having seizures and slipping into comas. In about 40 percent of cases, they died.

. . .

The outbreak turned out to be tied to hypoglycin, a toxin found in the ackee fruit that inhibits the body’s ability to synthesize glucose, leading to acute hypoglycemia, or low blood glucose levels. “It had been going on for a decade, if not a century, before people really figured out what it was,” Dr. Srikantiah said. “Now, the grandmothers and the mothers teach their kids, ‘Don’t eat the unripe ackee fruit.’ ”

By late 2014, laboratory tests confirmed that lychees also contain high levels of hypoglycin, as well as a similar toxin known as methylenecyclopropyl glycine, or MCPG.

This was an answer hiding in plain sight. The Muzaffarpur area, in India’s east, produces about 70 percent of India’s lychee harvest, and around the affected villages, “you really couldn’t go 100 meters without bumping into a lychee orchard,” Dr. Srikantiah said, referring to a distance of 330 feet.

Though orchards were typically guarded by caretakers, children often ate lychees that were unripe or that had fallen to the ground. But because everyone in the region eats them, it was difficult for many to believe that, in isolated cases, it could set off a catastrophic illness.