India's "suicide tree" is also a tool for murder

AFP

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[Caption]  An Indian man looks at the fruit of a Cerbera
odollam tree in Trivandrum, India. An Indian tree with
poisonous fruit is used by more people to commit suicide
than any other plant in the world and has a barely-
investigated role in murder, French and Indian scientists
say

An Indian tree with poisonous fruit is used by more
people to commit suicide than any other plant in the
world and has a barely-investigated role in murder,
French and Indian scientists say.

In one Indian state alone, deaths from the Cerbera
odollam tree are running at an average of almost one a
week, they say.

According to their investigations in the southwestern
state of Kerala, 537 deaths can be attributed to odollam
poisonings in the 11 years between 1989 and 1999, with
the annual toll running from 11 to as high as 103.

"The odollam tree is responsible for about 50 percent of
the plant poisoning cases and 10 percent of the total
poisoning cases in Kerala," say the team, led by Yvan
Gaillard of France's Laboratory of Analytical Toxicology.

"To the best of our knowledge, no plant in the world is
responsible for as many deaths by suicide as the odollam
tree."

Between 70 and 75 percent of suicide victims are women,
raising questions about marital strife and in-law
problems in India, and the fruit "is also occasionally
used for homicide," according to their probe.

The odollam tree grows to a height of 15 metres (48
feet), with dark green lives and a milky white latex sap.

It has large white flowers with a delicate, jasmine-like
perfume and a fruit that, when still green, looks like a
small mango and is sometimes eaten by children, with
tragic consequences.

Those who commit suicide mash up the white kernel with
sugar and eat it, while for murder, "a few kernels are
mixed with food containing plenty of chillies to cover
the bitter taste of the poison. Death is likely to occur
three-to-six hours after ingestion."

Odollam's weapon is a toxin called cerberin, which works
by stopping the heart, which is why many poisonings --
unless samples are tested by liquid chromatography and
mass spectrometry -- are likely to to be written off as
fatal heart attacks, Gaillard's team say.

The risk of using odollam for suicide or worse may also
apply in countries where it does not grow naturally,
because the fruit may be brought in by the Asian
diaspora, Gaillard's team says.

Odollam is "an extremely toxic plant that is relatively
unknown to western doctors, chemists, analysts and even
coroners and forensic scientists."

Their study is published in the October issue of a US
publication, the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. The
British weekly New Scientist reports on the findings in
next Saturday's issue.

C. odollam grows in coastal salt swamps and creeks in
south India and along riverbanks in southern and central
Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In Kerala, the
tree is known as othalanga maram, while in the adjacent
state of Tamil Nadu it is known as kattu arali.

In Southeast Asia, where the oily seeds are used as
insect repellent or are burned for light, the common
names for it are pong-pong, buta-buta or nyan.

One of its relatives, Cerbera venenifera, grows widely in
Madagascar, and was used as an "ordeal poison" in
previous centuries to determine guilt or innocence among
suspected witches or groups accused of plotting against
the king.

In Madagascar's central province, as many as 6,000 people
are thought to have died in a single ordeal, according to
a 1991 study.

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