
© LaylaBird/E+/Getty ImagesAuto-brewery syndrome is an extremely rare condition in which bacteria and fungus in the gastrointestinal tract turn the carbohydrates in everyday food into ethanol.
Her breath reeked of alcohol. She was dizzy, disoriented and weak, so much so that one day she passed out and hit her head on a kitchen counter while making lunch for her school-age children.
Yet not a drop of liquor had passed her lips, a fact that the 50-year-old Toronto woman and her husband told doctors for two years before someone actually believed her.
"She visited her family doctor again and again and went to the emergency room seven times over two years," said Dr. Rahel Zewude, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto.
Doctors found the woman's alcohol levels could range between 30 millimoles per liter and 62 millimoles per liter — below 2 millimoles per liter is normal, Zewude said.
Alcohol levels of up to 62 millimoles per liter are extraordinarily high and would be considered life-threatening, even fatal, said Barbara Cordell, president of an advocacy association called
Auto-Brewery Syndrome Information and Research, which provides patient education and does research on the unusual condition.
Comment: It remains to be seen just what impact the outbreak will have, but with the vast majority of Israelis having received an mRNA covid jab, and the accumulative damage that can do to the immune system, they are certainly more vulnerable than ever before: