In today's sad but stark warning news, a 23-year-old woman died after swallowing a contaminated drink while on holiday in Indonesia.
Cheznye Emmons, a beautician, was backpacking with Joe Cook, her boyfriend, last summer when she bought the bottle of gin from a shop in Bukit Lawang in northern Sumatra.
The label looked normal and legit, so she drank the gin, not realising it was laced with methanol, which has a high toxicity in humans; it takes just 10ml (two tablespoons) of the stuff to cause permanent blindness. Its main use is to be transformed into formaldehyde, an embalming fluid.
After drinking it, Cheznye went blind and suffered convulsions. She was rushed to hospital, but after five days, she died.
Her family are now campaigning to bring awareness to the fact that, when abroad, drinks other than beer can easily contain all sorts of potentially fatal ingredients. 'She was focused on what she wanted to do with her life. She had lots of friends and had raised money for charity,' her mum Pamela Emmons has said. '[Her death] was like having a chunk of your heart ripped out but we know that she'd be proud of what we're doing to try to save lives.'
Her dad, Brenton, also pointed out: 'In a lot of these countries they mix methanol with spirits and wine without a thought for the dangers. It's very hard to tell the difference – sometimes there are bits floating in it, sometimes it might smell funny. This is being sold in shops, restaurants and bars – places where you might think it is safe. But the message is really "stick to beer" because otherwise you don't know what risk you are taking.'
'It is clear that she went off travelling expecting to enjoy life and to learn. Sadly this ended in her tragic death,' concluded Eleanor McGann, the coroner in Chelmsford, near Cheznye's family's home town of Great Wakering, Essex.
The family want to distribute 20,000 posters to GPs' surgeries for their Save A Life campaign to raise awareness of dodgy drinks abroad. Though it's impossible to work out how many other people have died this way – because of the way authorities will record deaths abroad – the family say they've since become aware of hundreds of similar cases.
Totally bleak, but a strong reminder to stick to safer drinks when you're headed abroad this summer.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.