Tulio Linares saw four of his relatives
and a neighbor die one by one in Venezuela. It all happened within a week,
following a family meal where they had ingested one of the few staples that are
still available and affordable in the starved nation: the starchy yucca o
cassava. The explanation came in the autopsies’ results. The Linares and their
friend had ingested the wrong kind of yuca, the so-called bitter yucca, which
is inadvertently being sold in the street as sweet yuca. The two roots are
almost undistinguishable, yet one is banned from the market because it contains
a component - hydrocyanic acid – that becomes poisonous if not properly
processed. More…
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