You sure that’s sugar?

The Bureau of Food and Drugs (BFAD) should immediately ban the sale of the highly toxic cleaner oxalic acid after forensic tests confirmed that at least four people have died from ingesting the substance.

The deaths last month of Jose Maria Escano and his wife Juliet in Las Piñas City were confirmed the other day by the PNP crime laboratory to have been caused by “shock secondary to ingestion of a toxic substance” which it identified as oxalic acid.

The substance generally used to whiten clothes during laundry was also blamed by toxicologists as the cause of the deaths of Ergo Cha owner William Abrigo and customer Suzaine Dagohoy in  Sampaloc, Manila last May.

Whether the deaths were due to inadvertent or advertent mixture of oxalic acid on the fatalities’ food or drinks, the substance is just too dangerous to be allowed to continue proliferating in the market.

It is just too easy to mistakenly put oxalic acid in foodstuff. First, it looks very much like iodized salt or white sugar. Second, it is repacked in small plastic bags also used in repacking sugar and salt. Third, even minors can buy it in sari-sari stores.

Because oxalic acid is readily available in the market and is commonly used in households, it can be considered to be more dangerous than the jewelry cleaners containing cyanide or the cyanide used in illegal fishing.

The jewelry cleaners and the cyanide fishermen, at least, know they are dealing with poison so lethal that spies during the Cold War years were said to have used them to commit suicide rather than be caught by the enemy.

However, cyanide from kamoteng kahoy or cassava is also as deadly as seen from the deaths of 27 school children who ate cassava fritters in Bohol in 2005. Let us be very careful with the many toxic substances in our homes. Better be safe than sorry. –End-

Image: Credit to the owner