Islands In Focus

May 26, 2006

 

The four people, including two children, are believed to have fallen ill after consuming corn boiled together with papaya blooms in their home in Polo village, South Amanuban district.

A relative of the family, Levy Betty, said the mother and father complained of headaches after consuming the food and went to a nearby community health center to seek treatment. But the wife, Anthoneta, could not be saved. "She died on the way to the center while her husband died at the center," Levy said. The two children died shortly afterwards at Soe hospital.

Head of the regency health agency, Markus Ng Righutta, said Wednesday that a medical team had been dispatched to seek the cause of the family's death. The police were also investigating whether any crimes were involved. -- JP

This sounds like a pretty severe case of FP.. dont you think? Wonder if WHO have looked into this?

Flores is the island where the "Hobbitt" humans lived and were believed to be alive well into the period of modern man.

Ironically, when the announcement was made that a new strain of miniature man had been "found" on that island (bones only), I immediately flashed back to the Negritos that I had met on the Island of Luzon in the Philippines.  They were about the size of the reconstructed Hobbitt, and were very much alive and talking individuals.  Small heads and proportions because they were small people.

The scientists doing the digging on Flores had theorized that the Hobbitt was probably not as smart as modern man because his head was smaller and thus has less capacity for intelligence.  Since we supposedly only use about ten percent of our mental capacity, my guess is that the Negritos and the Hobbitt were probably as smart as us.  Probably far more practical, too.  If the Hobbitt died out, it was probably because he was killed off by modern man (a known predator).

Reports from the 1918 flu say that people were fine in the morning and dead by afternoon...they should be checking this as a possible mutation

Food poisoning doesn't usually kill people, in fact I've never heard of it being lethal except as leading to a secondary condition.  It would have to be that there was some kind of chemical poison mixed with the food. Too hard to swallow this as a case of food poison. Yep pun intended.

This is kindof clutching at straws, if you ask me.

Could have been any number of things. A couple of likely scenarios:

Somebody accidently picked a poisonous plant & it got mixed in with the meal. Oleander grows in virtually every tropical country in the world and will kill that quickly and is VERY toxic. So do castor beans. Just as an example.

Poisoning -- intential or accidental. Maybe they put strychnine out for rodents and it got mixed in with the grain somehow.

Coincidence -- they could have eaten something else the day before & by coincidence, got sick a few hours after the meal and blamed the meal. We do this in the western world all the time -- you hear very regularly, "I ate at XYZ fast food place and got sick an hour later and I'll never eat there again!" -- even though the incubation period on most forms of food poisoning is a good bit longer than an hour.

Also, vomiting and diahrea, if they WERE poisoned by their meal -- say, a good dose of toxins from E. Coli -- can kill quite quickly. Particularly in a developing world where it may take hours to get to the hospital, not minutes. Hours of puking will dehydrate and kill you.

I would also assume that this area has endemic issues like, oh, cholera. See above about dying for want of a few dollars worth of anti-emetics and IV fluids.

Leva

It says the corn and papaya were boiled.  Wonder if they boiled it long?