SAN PEDRO CITY—Police on Monday (May 18) submitted for lab tests samples of lambanog, or coconut wine, that was being blamed for the death of three people in the town of Los Banos, Laguna province.
While police have identified the sellers of the wine as Rodel Valdez and Dary Remegio, Los Baños police chief Lt. Col. Louie Dionglay said police could not press charges until they have proof that the drink was responsible for the deaths at the village of Maahas. Autopsy results have yet to come out, too.
Dionglay and Ferdinand Vergara, Maahas village chief, said the fatalities—Christian Macaraig, 34; Analyn Jubilo, 31 and Jubilo’s live-in partner Regino Lapitan, 47—drank the wine with three neighbors on May 15.
The police report said they began to suffer stomachache the next day.
In a separate phone interview, Vergara said Macaraig died Saturday (May 16) afternoon.
The local government was preparing for Macaraig’s burial, when Lapitan came to his office and reported the death of Jubilo, Vergara said.
He said Lapitan had just left his office when the man began vomiting on his way home. Lapitan was taken to a hospital but died around 3 a.m. on Sunday (May 17).
Another neighbor of the fatalities, farmer Cornelio Tandang, 56, was taken to a hospital after showing similar symptoms of alcohol poisoning.
The incident happened amid an ongoing ban on liquor and mass gatherings in an effort to curb the spread of SARS Cov2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
In December, officials traced high levels of methanol mixed into the lambanog that killed at least 14 people and sickened hundreds in the rural towns of Rizal and Nagcarlan, also in Laguna, and in Candelaria, Quezon.
Health experts again warned against buying unregulated brands of lambanog, rebottled and sold cheap in local stores, due to folk belief that the drink could substitute for disinfectants in killing coronavirus.