Woman escapes drink driving conviction by proving that her body is a brewery

Rare condition: the woman escaped a conviction
Hannah Al-Othman31 December 2015

A New York woman escaped a drink driving conviction after proving that her body is a brewery.

The woman was arrested after she was caught with a blood-alcohol level more than four times the legal limit.

She insisted she had had no more than three drinks in the six hours before she was pulled over for erratic driving October 11, 2014.

However, the woman was charged with driving while intoxicated when a breath test showed her blood-alcohol content to be 0.33 per cent.

The legal limit in New York is just 0.08.

The arrest led the woman to discover she has a rare condition called “auto-brewery syndrome”, where her digestive system converts ordinary food into alcohol.

She bought home a breath test kit and blew into it every night for 18 days, each time registering around 0.20 per cent.

A judge in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg in upstate New York dismissed the charges against the woman, who can not be named for medical confidentiality reasons, after her lawyer Joseph Marusak presented research by a doctor showing she had the previously undiagnosed condition.

“At the end of the day, she had a blood-alcohol content of 0.36% without drinking any alcoholic beverages,” Mr Marusak said.

The rare condition, also known as gut fermentation syndrome, leads to high levels of yeast in the intestines, which ferment high-carbohydrate foods into alcohol.

The condition was first documented in the 1970s in Japan, but was first recorded in the US in 2013, and both medical and legal experts in America say the condition is being raised more frequently in drunken-driving cases as it is becomes more widely known.

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