Yes, this happens with some regularity. Usually during wedding season (dry season) and at large funerals. The reason it's in the news is what you said.

Search any of the local news sites for 'alcohol poisoning' in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and you will have a lot of results.

Also goes for stories covering children, too.

As an aside, I always wondered if the opposite rings true in countries where the minority is white. Ethnocentrism?

Maybe we just consider it a sacrifice of a few beautiful people to help make things safer for the rest of us.

Possibly. But why does this need to be said? How is it relevant here? What does it offer?

Tbf the middle photo is a bit of a paralysis demon.

Yes, but you need to drink untainted alcohol in huge quantities to give your liver something to do instead of killing you. When you don't know, you drink in moderation, or worse each following drink has more methanol in it. You might be fucked before you even realize what's going on, and even with a doctor in the room it's not immediately obvious what's happening.

The preferred antidote is fomepizole together with hemodialysis.

Fomepizole works by blocking the enzyme that converts methanol and ethylene glycol to their toxic breakdown products.[4]

I heard of it as an emergency stopgap measure until you can make it to the hospital to get pumped out and properly treated. But it's been a while, I could misremember

Yeah, in Laos there are no enbys, just men, women, and the profession

Silver lining...

You can test for methanol in various ways during destillation. But also you don't need to test for it, if you control your temperature properly and discard a sufficient amount at the beginning.

Even if you would not discard anything, if you fill all your destillate in one container, so ethanol and methanol mix again, it decreases the effectiveness of the methanol.

Methanol itself is not directly toxic. The damage is done by formaldehyde and formic acid that come from your body metabolising the methanol. Methanol gets metabolized on the same routes as ethanol, which the body favors. So one way to treat methanol poisoning is by ingesting untainted ethanol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_poisoning

All fermented drinks contain both ethanol and methanol. But because the ratio is not altered with bad distillation, you wont get methanol poisoning from untainted beer or wine.

The only quick and easy way I know is to burn it in a dark room. If you get a pure blue flame you're good. But if it's at all orange, it needs another go through the still.

Do you realise how fucking regulated alcohol making and indeed, any sort of food or beverage making is in Europe? This sort of shit only happens in countries where you have a deadly mixture of ignorance, poverty and corruption.

Farmers in rural France know you throw away the first part of the moonshine because it's the part that makes you go blind, for example. And it's precisely to prevent any sort of accidental mishaps they ended up forbidding the making of it anyway (it used to be allowed for cattle farmers, iirc). Although I believe they rolled back that one, what with the explosion of microbreweriea and such. Also if it's legal can tax it.

Before the Russians went full stupid, they would bring illegal booze across the border into Poland and most of it should have been poured into a fuel tank.

RELEASE THE UGLY OLD MAN PICS

Homemade alcohol being deadly because of methanol is a myth. If you just look at what ingredients you put it, it's clear the amount of methanol is too small to be deadly.

This is almost always someone cutting their booze with cheap methanol.

With my wife we drank a shoot of artisan cachaza in Rio de Janeiro once, it was really tasty but got us drunk on the spot and the next day we had the worst hangover we can remember. Artisans cachazas are kinda common om Rio, but never again, it's not worth It.

Local events don't tend to make international news in general, regardless of where it happens.

Locals cared, obviously.

Locals don't drink cocktails. They drink lao-lao or beer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao-Lao