A recent report released by the Annals of Emergency Medicine reveals the source of a 2011 botulism outbreak in a Utah prison: the prison's self-styled hootch master was feeling creative, and tossed a baked potato into the mix. The resulting batch of prison wine sickened eight inmates.
Amazingly, none of the inmates died, although three of them had to be put on respirators for up to two months while their bodies worked through the toxins. Botulism is one of the world's most lethal and effective poisons, and there is no cure. An antitoxin exists, but it only prevents newly-affected nerves from absorbing the poison; it doesn't help the nerves which have already been infected.
Prison wine, commonly known as "pruno," is typically made by throwing a bunch of food into a plastic bag along with some hot water and keeping it warm while it ferments. Under ideal circumstances ("ideal" being a relative term) the pruno is made with fresh or canned fruit. But a wide variety of foods can be used, one of the more popular blends being sauerkraut and orange juice.
The basic recipe for alcohol is sugar, yeast, and time. The recipe for botulism is Clostridium spores plus an anaerobic environment (one without oxygen). In theory the alcohol in the prison wine might kill the Clostridium bacteria, but in practice the alcohol content varies widely from 2-14%, plus the potato in question was added to the mix at the beginning, before the alcohol formed.
Frankly I am less concerned about inmates being poisoned by prison wine than I am by the existence of Clostridium spores on baked potatoes in the prison mess hall. Aren't prisons held to the same standards of food safety as the rest of us? Shouldn't the potatoes have been baked well enough to prevent botulism? Scary stuff!
Image courtesy Flickr/valery.photography
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