After arriving home I searched my medical books and even the web to find out what could have caused all the vomiting and seizures from eating amala, a local food usually made from yam. As I researched, I came across cyanide poisoning and discovered that it can cause vomiting and seizures. How do you get cyanide poisoning from food? It can come from cassava flour which is not properly processed. At times they make amala from cassava or a mixture of yam and cassava. There is no antidote for cyanide poisoning. 
 

The next day I woke up and rushed to the wards to see if the patients made it through the night. I started in the pediatric ward and discovered that all the children were still alive. Thank God! All the children continued to have seizures through the night, including the little three-year-old, but the seizures finally subsided by morning.   I raced to the other wards and discovered that all the women and men also survived the night and were improving. 

I also found out that in that many patients had been admitted with the same symptoms, a total of 15 patients, all of them after eating amala. 
 

 All 15 patients, including the three children, eventually improved and were discharged home, but we still had a problem. We didn’t know the real cause of the poisoning. So I decided to go to  the home of the three boys (they were brothers and they are pictured below with their mother).  It was their grandfather who had been brought dead to the hospital. I went to collect a sample of the yam flour which was used to make the amala. I wanted to send it to IITA (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture) in Ibadan, a city about an hour from our hospital, in order to analyze it for poisons and toxins. The grandmother told me that she was about to throw the yam flour into the river. She also said that the same day that the family ate the amala, their goats also ate it, had seizures and died. So we collected the sample and sent it for analysis.
 

The analysis from IITA showed that the yam did not have any cyanide, which is what we were assuming it was. It also had no aflatoxin, another toxin which can cause severe food poisoning. Instead they found high amounts of pesticide. The amounts were so high that it was the cause of all the seizures and severe vomiting. IITA also analyzed other yam flour from Lagos where 5 died and 20 were hospitalized after eating amala. The analysis from that yam also showed it was pesticide related.

Needless to say, very few people are eating amala anymore. We have reported the findings of the analysis to the community leaders and they have promised to trace the source of the pesticide-laiden amala. We pray we won’t see any more cases like this again.