Deaths at a funeral

At least 72 people who drank a homemade beer at a funeral in Mozambique over the weekend have died, health officials have announced. Authorities believe that the beer, a traditional millet-based brew called pombe, was poisoned during the course of the funeral. While the death toll has gone up, the number of individuals hospitalized from the beer has dropped dramatically. There are currently 35 in the hospital following the apparent poisoning, regional health official Paula Bernardo told the Associated Press. Yesterday, more than 169 people were reportedly still seeking treatment. “As we prepared to determine the cause of death of people we began to receive a lot of people with diarrhea and other muscle aches. After that we began to receive dead bodies from several neighborhoods,” Bernardo told a state-run radio station in Mozambique. Officials believe that the brew was poisoned some time during the daylong funeral, but have few leads on the cause or motivation. Those who drank the brew only in the morning had no signs of illness, but those who drank in the afternoon were sick by the next morning. And what was the poison, I hear you ask? Carle Mosse, a provincial health director, told reporters that some suspected the brew was poisoned with crocodile bile. So did a district health official going by the name Alex Albertini. But it’s not clear where the evidence for that suspicion is coming from. Testing has not yet been completed on samples taken from the brew and from victims, according to the BBC. The samples sent to the National Laboratory in the capital city Maputo contain “suspicious objects found inside the drum” where the beer was stored, but to make things even more complicated, the Associated Press reported that the drum in which the beer was held has since “disappeared.” Seriously, people. Don't trust home-made liquor, otherwise it could be your funeral the tainted home-brew is being served at.