A court in Brugge, Belgium, found a man not guilty of a drunk driving charge after three doctors confirmed that his own body was making alcohol that ended up in his blood stream.
A Belgian man was with a rare medical condition was cleared of drunk driving charges on April 22. The court accepted his lawyer’s argument that he had a rare condition called “auto-brewery syndrome”. Three doctors confirmed it – the man’s own body makes alcohol inside him and causes him to have illegal amounts of alcohol in his blood stream. By proving that he has the condition, the Belgian man avoided up to 11,000 euro in fines.
Second offense
The 40-year-old man was stopped by police in 2022 and given a breathalyzer test. The results showed 0.91 milligrams of alcohol per liter. A month later his breath contained 0.71 milligrams. This is more than three times the legal limit in Belgium, which is 0.22 milligrams per liter of air exhaled.
This was the man’s second run-in with the law regarding drunk driving. In 2019, his license had been suspended and he had been fined for drunk driving. He claimed that he had not drunk any alcohol on that occasion, either. His condition seems to have been unknown at that time.
The man’s lawyer, Anse Ghesquier, said that the man had been placed on a low-carbohydrate diet to keep the alcohol production down.
A rare but not unknown syndrome
The act that the man in this case worked at a brewery does not seem to be a factor in his acquiring auto-brewery syndrome. There are about 20 confirmed cases recorded, and auto-brewery is often the result of another problem in the intestinal tract. The National Institute of Health does record two cases where the yeast or fungi responsible for producing the alcohol were located in the oral cavity and the urinary tract, respectively. According to the NIH, the syndrome is treatable, overall, though sometimes difficult to eradicate and the patient may develop alcoholic dependencies before the physical effects are cured.
Other cases are as noteworthy as they are rare:
- In 2019, the same year that the then-37-year-old Belgian man was first arrested for drunk driving, a 25 year-old man ended up in the hospital with a blood alcohol level of 0.3 g/dL despite having had no alcohol. A three-week course of anti-fungal medication cleared the symptoms.
- In 2004, a 44-year-old male underwent an antibiotic treatment and returned to the hospital days later. with brewer’s yeast and Candida albicans in his gastric fluid causing the ethanol production, probably as a result of the antibiotic treatment disrupting the flora usually present in the stomach.
