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Fish sauce fumes kill workers
October 24 2002

A worker in southern Vietnam suffocated and four others were rushed to hospital after they were overcome by fish sauce fumes at the factory they worked in, an official said today.

Nguyen Van Bay, 34, climbed into a 2-metre-high vat that holds fish sauce to clean it out on Monday, but found that it had not been properly emptied of fermented fish used to make the pungent sauce.

Within minutes, Bay was overcome by the fumes of rotting fish and salt and fainted.

At least four fellow workers at the Ngoc Thach fish sauce factory climbed in to try to rescue him, but they too fainted, said Nguyen Trung Toan, a local official in Binh Thuan province, 100 kilometres east of Ho Chi Minh City.

Co-workers using face masks finally pulled the five people out of the vat and rushed them to hospital, but Bay could not be revived, Toan said.

Fermented fish sauce is a staple of many Southeast Asian cuisines, and the factories of southern Vietnam make especially prized sauces. The condiment is made by allowing anchovy and salt to distill in huge vats for months.

Chinese Fish Sauce May Up Esophageal Cancer Risk-(Reuters Health -13/06/2002)

A fermented fish sauce commonly used as a relish in southern China and some other parts of Southeast Asia may account for the unusually high number of cases of esophageal cancer in the area, Chinese researchers report. In a study of more than 1,200 people with esophageal cancer and a matching group of cancer-free people from the same area in China, people who ate the fish sauce, known as yulu in China and harm ha in the Philippines, were more than three times as likely to have esophageal cancer. The more frequently people ate the sauce, the higher their risk of cancer, according to a report in a recent issue of the International Journal of Cancer.

Compared to people who never ate the fish sauce, individuals who reported eating it every day were almost 16 times more likely to develop esophageal cancer. Smoking and drinking are well-established risk factors for esophageal cancer, but only smoking seemed to interact with consumption of fish sauce to increase cancer risk even further, the researchers report. As far as the researchers know, this is the first report of a link between fermented fish sauce and a high risk of esophageal cancer, Ke said. Ke's team decided to study the relationship between fermented fish sauce and esophageal cancer to see whether the food played a role in the high incidence of esophageal cancer in the Chaoshan area of Guangdong province in southern China. Yulu, the fish sauce, is very popular in this region, and previous research has suggested that fermented fish sauce may increase the risk of several types of cancers, including stomach cancer and thyroid cancer.

Based on the results of the study, Ke recommends that people in this region make changes to their diet to reduce their risk of esophageal cancer. Exactly how the fish sauce may increase the risk of cancer is still uncertain, though. The condiment may contain substances that either cause cancer or promote its growth once it develops, the authors speculate. Noting that the risk of esophageal cancer was particularly high in people who ate fish sauce and smoked, the researchers suggest that substances in the sauce may enhance the effects of cancer-causing chemicals in cigarettes.