OK, the summer’s finally kicked in, and you’re all crowding around the barbeque. That ice-cold can of beer suddenly looks tempting. So you pull off the tab, put the can to your lips and . . . stop! Look, it’s not clever, it’s not grown-up, and it may kill you.
That was the sad fate of one woman who, while on a boat trip off the coast of Madagascar, drank a can of drink she had put in the boat’s refrigerator. She was taken ill, and she died two days later.
The post mortem revealed that she had died of fulminating leptospirosis. Apparently, at some stage, a rat had urinated on the can.
A glass, anyone?
(Source: La Gazette de la Grande Ile, 6 April 2004).