Sad to hear another Australian has died of methanol poisoning in Bali.
www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-to-raise-methanol-poisoning-with-indonesia-20130107-2cca1.html
Liam Davies from WA and only 19 years old....Hopefully the message gets out there not to drink the ** they serve up in Bali bars, particularly the el cheapo ones.
I'd like to know the circumstances around this - was it a dodgy bar? Were the kids drinking to excess? A similar case happened last year to a nurse from Wollongong called Jamie Johnston. She survived with blindness or something I think. She and her mum had no travel insurance - they're up for a Darwin award for stupidity on that one. If they were too tighta*se, or too stupid to fork out for travel insurance, I'd guess they were hanging around low-rent venues too, where arak is riskier. I'd add a message 'don't go to Bali without travel insurance', but in the interests of raising our species' IQ, it's probably better to keep that one quiet! Another WA guy died earlier too from methanol poisoning. Very sad, you don't go to such a beautiful place to come back in a body bag. Take care people!!!
I think you have to drink quite a bit of that stuff for it to be fatal.
It used to be quite common 50 years ago for those on the skids to partake of a bit of meths and it had no immediate effects in small amounts but you eventually went blind if you kept at it.
Methylated spirits is about 96% ethanol which is the stuff you can drink but thy de-nature it with 4% methanol, which you can't drink. You can't distil it out because the two have roughly the same boiling point.
The problem is in places like that, they don't seem to follow up the pricks who put it in the drinks with proper penalties. It really is close to murder when they know some people will drink it until they are totally rotten. 
First post - negative (although more of a warning) & a dodgy username...I'm calling TROLL.
Re travel Insurance and Methanol, most travel insurance policies would provide no cover for this type of poisoning as the intention was to injest alcohol. You will find under most basic policies, alcohol related incidents are excluded.
The only way cover may be available under a policy would be if the person that was poisoned did not intentd to consume the alcohol.
