Ants can be trained to detect cancer in urine, a new study finds.
Although ant sniffing is a long way from being used as a diagnostic tool in humans, the results are encouraging, the researchers said.
Because ants lack noses, they use olfactory receptors on their antennae to help them find food or sniff out potential mates. For the study, published Jan. 25 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (opens in new tab), scientists trained nearly three dozen silky ants (Formica fusca) to use these acute olfactory receptors for a different task: finding tumors.
In a lab, scientists grafted slices of breast cancer tumors from human samples onto mice and taught the 35 insects to “associate urine from the tumor-bearing rodents with sugar,” according to The Washington Post (opens in new tab). Once placed in a petri dish, the ants spent 20% more time next to urine samples containing cancerous tumors versus healthy urine, according to the study.
“They just want to eat sugar,” Baptiste Piqueret (opens in new tab), the study’s lead author and an ethologist at Sorbonne Paris North University in France, told The Washington Post.
Related: Some cancer cells grow stronger after chemo. Research hints at how to kill them.
Because tumor cells contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that researchers can use as cancer biomarkers, animals such as dogs — and now ants — can be quickly trained to detect these anomalies through their sense of smell. However, researchers think that ants “may have the edge over dogs and other animals that are [more] time-consuming to train,” according to The Washington Post.
This is important because the earlier cancer is detected, the sooner treatment can begin. The researchers are hopeful that cancer-sniffing ants have the potential “to act as efficient and inexpensive cancer bio-detectors,” they wrote in their study.
“The results are very promising,” Piqueret said. However, he cautioned that “it’s important to know that we are far from using them as a daily way to detect cancer.”
Removing urine from wastewater and using it as fertilizer has the potential to decrease nutrient loading in water bodies and boost sustainability by making use of a common waste material.
In excess, nitrogen and phosphorus in our waste streams can stimulate algal blooms and create conditions dangerous to marine and lake ecosystems and human health. According to the website of the Rich Earth Institute, a Vermont-based company focused on using human waste as a resource, most of the nitrogen and phosphorus in wastewater comes from human urine, even though it makes up only 1 percent of wastewater. Removing urine could remove 75 percent of the nitrogen and 55 percent of the phosphorus from municipal wastewater treatment plants. And those nutrients could then be recycled for use as fertilizer.
The rub is against systems that are used to the way things are. Wastewater infrastructure is set up to get waste out of the house, without much thought, using pipes that already exist and toilets people are used to. Urine diversion would require changing some of these details, while putting the diverted material to use will need more acceptance of waste as valuable.
The power of one
Abe Noe-Hays, co-founder of Rich Earth, said that the statistics on urine’s place in wastewater is what got the ball rolling on urine diversion, an attempt to keep it out of the waste stream in the first place.
A urine diverting toilet makes use of the body’s anatomy. When sitting on the toilet, pee naturally goes toward the front of the bowl, while feces go to the back. Therefore, the front half of a divided toilet bowl catches the urine and can send it to a separate drain for urine only, while the back remains connected to a wastewater treatment system per usual. Separate pipes divert the urine to a collection tank. This system might not be perfect—good aim is a bonus if it’s used while standing, and some new plumbing is required—but it does benefit from tweaking existing infrastructure.
If there’s any possibility of fecal mixing, the World Health Organization has (believe it or not) guidelines for how long urine should be stored before being used as fertilizer. After six months at room temperature, urine has self-sanitized enough to be used on anything, including raw produce, Noe-Hays said.
The key here is that if the urine is urine only, it’s ready to go as a nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich fertilizer the moment it leaves the body. But getting a good separation is important. Feces are the main source of pathogens in the collected urine, according to Björn Vinnerås, environmental engineering professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Urine-diverting toilets aren’t perfect, he said, and some mixing is unavoidable.
If it can be separated, urine can act to partly sterilize itself. The nitrogen in urine leaves the body as urea, a simple organic compound. Bacteria in pipes typically break down urea into ammonia. When urine is sitting in a container, the ammonia raises the pH of the solution to about eight or nine. The high pH environment kills any pathogens from the body that might have entered the urine, Vinnerås said.
“It’s like a Twinkie,” Noe-Hays said, referring to urine’s long shelf-life.
Ease of transport
Noe-Hays was part of a study that looked at concentrations of pharmaceuticals in urine. Caffeine and ibuprofen were among the most common and abundant. After urine was applied to soil, however, the drug concentration in the crops was extremely low. According to the study, to consume the amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee from urine-fertilized produce, a person would have to eat a pound of the produce every day for about 2,000 years, Noe-Hays said.
Gardeners often use urine as fertilizer, and Noe-Hays said it works wonders from his personal experience. Noe-Hays said there is no necessary concentration of nutrients for urine to be used as fertilizer. The mass of its components is what matters. If pouring 1,000 gallons of urine on an acre, there are about 50 pounds of nitrogen added. Using a concentrate 10 times stronger than diluted urine, only 100 gallons would need to be applied to get the same impact, Noe-Hays said. “The hay doesn’t care whether you’re applying the concentrate or the dilute,” he continued. “It just matters how many total pounds of fertilizer it gets.”
For urine to be useful as fertilizer for something more than a personal garden, it’s helpful to take advantage of the ability to concentrate it. A spinoff of Rich Earth called Brightwater Tools is working on concentrating urine by freezing it, Noe-Hays said.
Freezing the water out of urine leaves behind the nutrients in a slurry that can be used onsite or shipped to a farm. Concentrating the urine makes the volume more manageable, particularly if urine-diverting toilets are used in a commercial or office building. Instead of needing multiple visits from urine-specific trucks to empty the tanks, the concentration hardware allows the urine to be sanitized, pasteurized, and freeze-concentrated on-site. In trials, the concentration levels reached a factor of 10, meaning trucks might come to collect every few months instead of every week.
Vinnerås brought up dehydration as another method for making urine fertilizer useful on a larger scale. Some of his research is looking at stopping the urea breakdown that happens in pipes. If urea doesn’t break down, the nitrogen remains solid when dehydrated, creating a dry fertilizer of about 15 to 20 percent nitrogen.
The advantage he sees with producing a dry product is the chance to piggyback on existing infrastructure for chemical fertilizer management. Machinery already exists to apply dry fertilizer, and storing it can be as simple as piling bags on top of each other.
A man who drinks his own urine each morning as he believes it is a natural ‘cure-all’ says his bizarre habit led to a bust-up with his housemate – who was sick of the ‘smell’ wafting into the kitchen.
The man, who goes by Brother Sage, says he first started the unusual practice almost two decades ago and is currently flogging a course for up to $345 for students who wish to unlock the secrets of their own urine.
The 68-year-old, from Colorado, claims he often stores the urine he passes during the night for an early morning beverage, but has also been known to age it for up to three years and even use it as a foot soak or an eye bath.
He claims some of his loyal followers have even given wee to their kids to drink and ‘watched their health be returned’ – while others allow their dogs to bathe in it.
While there remains no concrete scientific evidence that drinking urine offers any health benefits, Brother Sage swears by it and believes it heals everything from viruses to sunburn.
But despite his many fans, Brother Sage claims he recently locked horns with his housemate over the ‘smelly’ practice and is now looking for another location to practice ‘urotherapy’ in the future.
The man, who goes by Brother Sage, says he first started drinking his urine almost two decades ago and is currently flogging a course for up to $340 for students who wish to unlock the secrets of their wee
He claimed he often stores the urine he passes during the night for an early morning beverage but has also been known to age it for up to three years and even use it as a foot soak or an eye bath
Brother Sage, said: ‘I wake up in the morning and I’ll drink what I saved in the night.
‘Most people will drink it first thing in the morning and people who are fasting or on detox will do “looping”, which means everything they collect will be drank throughout the day.
‘The cleaner you can get your diet, the better it’ll look, taste and smell.’
Despite his teaching being published in his five books, Brother Sage claims he does come across ‘naysayers’ who question his beliefs – and most recently locked horns with his housemate over ‘smelly’ urine.
Brother Sage said: ‘I do get the naysayers or the ones who are doubters but I’ve learned to be compassionate with people because they don’t know what this is yet.
Brother Sage said he once locked horns with a housemate who complained about the smell of urine in their kitchen
Bottoms up! Brother Sage said he began to drink his urine in 1994, and that it had nothing to do with health at the start
They’re going based on theory and information from doctors, television and school.
‘It’s a good idea if this is your lifestyle to check in with potential housemates so they know you do this in your room, bathroom or in the house, so there won’t be that moment of “Surprise, I do urine therapy”.
‘That created a hiccup in the house I’m in and I’m just readjusting where I do my practice now and starting to look for a new location.
‘The bedroom and my bathroom are too close to the kitchen so smells go down the hallway.
‘I’m [now] either practicing out in the yard, go to a nearby location or hot springs and spend three days just having a good time with it, then it’s out of my system.
Brother Sage pictured with a jar of his own urine. He has written five books about the beniits of drinking your own urine
The ‘urotherapist’ uses his urine both internally and topically and says no illness cannot be cured when you understand how the body works
‘When there’s something so near and dear to you, it feels like a compromise not being able to do the practice.
‘We had a lovely talk – a heart to heart – and there’s no hard feeling. We just need to make some adjustments.’
Brother Sage claims he is helping to build an international community of urotherapy practitioners – and he says there are people across the world who consume their own urine or use it topically.
Brother Sage said: ‘I started urine therapy in 1994. It was [initially] a total spiritual connection for me and nothing to do with health.
Brother Sage promotes his work on Facebook and holds workshop to teach people about the properties of their own urine, charging $185 per person and $345 for couples
The urine drinker with a friend. He said he believes urine can help with any condition ‘from mosquito bites, sunburns, wasp stings, to gum conditions’
‘As the years progressed, I realised there were some things I wanted to improve with my health.
‘I increased the use, dosages. There are over 24 topical uses on the skin, eyes and ears.
‘People are healing everything because there are no such things as incurable disease when you understand how the body operates.
‘They’re healing everything from mosquito bites, sunburns, wasp stings, to gum conditions.
‘We’ve got a woman working with a 21-year-old man with autism who is seeing results.
Now Brother Sage is preparing to deliver his 12th course on urotherapy for students and couples – which he promises will teach people to basics of the practice
The urotherapist said that some of the people who studied from him are now teaching others about drinking urine too
‘The most unusual thing is people are feeding it to their pets and their kids and watching their health be returned.
‘We realised that [urine] is a universal panacea remedy. You can use a man’s, a woman’s and cross it over. A dog’s, a child’s, a human, non-human – it works regardless.
‘Some people have constipation and challenges in their intestines. What they’re doing is an entire GI flush.
‘Some are doing aged urine enemas but if you want to clean the entire GI tract, drink an entire litre of urine and within 20 or 30 minutes you’d better be near a toilet because waves of bowel movements will start happening.
DOES DRINKING URINE REALLY BENEFIT YOUR HEALTH?
Urine therapy is said to date back to the Bible. Historical documents suggest that the Aztecs disinfected wounds with it, while the benefits are also mentioned in Indian and Chinese literature.
Fans of ‘urotherapy’, a term used to describe drinking your own pee, include Madonna.
In 1945, John W. Armstrong, a British naturopath, published a book claiming that drinking urine could cure all major illnesses, however there is no scientific proof of this.
Urine is highly sterile, consisting of 95 per cent water and five per cent nutrients such as proteins, vitamins and minerals. During the digestive process, the liver deals with toxins and removes them to be excreted.
The blood then goes to the kidneys where it is filtered again and extraneous components the body no longer needs are collected in a sterile solution which is then passed as urine.
But GP Dr Rob Hicks told the Mail: ‘Over the years many people have claimed health benefits from drinking their own urine, but as far as I’m aware there is no scientific evidence to back-up these claims.
‘The kidneys are an efficient filtering system getting rid of what the body doesn’t need, so to put this back into the body seems counter-productive.
‘Personally, I believe there are better – and more palatable – ways to keep the body healthy including not smoking, eating a healthy diet, and keeping stress under control.’
Health expert Aisling Pigott, dietician and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, added that urine contains toxins expelled from the body and kidneys, and drinking it could therefore be harmful and cause infection.
‘It sure saves people from the embarrassment of going to a professional colonic lady.’
Now Brother Sage is preparing to deliver his 12th course on urotherapy for students and couples – which he promises will teach people to basics of the practice.
Brother Sage said: ‘The course is a six-part series over 15 hours.
‘People will learn all the basics, how to use the protocols, what the history of urine therapy is, what kind of testimonials people have talked about, the difficulties and challenges and how to explain it to people.
‘People will get an overall, really solid base so they know how to have a better use of these protocols for personal practice as well as how to guide and teach other people. Some of my students are becoming teachers and therapists.
‘I have students in the UK. There are people out there building a community.
‘I’ve noticed this community has created best friends for life and opened up relationship that people never would have had.’
When you take aspirin for a headache, how does the aspirin know to travel to your head and alleviate the pain?
The short answer is, it doesn’t: Molecules can’t transport themselves through the body, and they don’t have control over where they eventually end up.
But researchers can chemically modify drug molecules to make sure that they bind strongly to the places we want them and weakly to the places we don’t.
Pharmaceutical products contain more than just the active drug that directly affects the body. Medications also include “inactive ingredients,” or molecules that enhance the stability, absorption, flavor and other qualities that are critical to allowing the drug to do its job.
For example, the aspirin you swallow also has ingredients that both prevent the tablet from fracturing during shipping and help it break apart in your body.
As a pharmaceutical scientist, I’ve been studying drug delivery for the past 30 years. That is, developing methods and designing nondrug components that help get a medication where it needs to go in the body.
To better understand the thought process behind how different drugs are designed, let’s follow a drug from when it first enters the body to where it eventually ends up.
How drugs are absorbed in the body
When you swallow a tablet, it will initially dissolve in your stomach and intestines before the drug molecules are absorbed into your bloodstream. Once in the blood, it can circulate throughout the body to access different organs and tissues.
Drug molecules affect the body by binding to different receptors on cells that can trigger a particular response.
Even though drugs are designed to target specific receptors to produce a desired effect, it is impossible to keep them from continuing to circulate in the blood and binding to nontarget sites that potentially cause unwanted side effects.
Drug molecules circulating in the blood also degrade over time and eventually leave the body in your urine. A classic example is the strong smell your urine might have after you eat asparagus because of how quickly your kidney clears asparagusic acid. Similarly, multivitamins typically contain riboflavin, or vitamin B2, which causes your urine to turn bright yellow when it is cleared.
Because how efficiently drug molecules can cross the intestinal lining can vary depending on the drug’s chemical properties, some of the drugs you swallow never get absorbed and are removed in your feces.
Because not all of the drug is absorbed, this is why some medications, like those used to treat high blood pressure and allergies, are taken repeatedly to replace eliminated drug molecules and maintain a high enough level of drug in the blood to sustain its effects on the body.
Getting drugs to the right place
Compared with pills and tablets, a more efficient way of getting a drug into the blood is to inject it directly into a vein. This way, all the drug gets circulated throughout the body and avoids degradation in the stomach.
Many drugs that are given intravenously are “biologics” or “biotechnology drugs,” which include substances derived from other organisms.
The most common of these are a type of cancer drug called monoclonal antibodies, proteins that bind to and kill tumor cells. These drugs are injected directly into a vein because your stomach can’t tell the difference between digesting a therapeutic protein and digesting the proteins in a cheeseburger.
In other cases, drugs that need very high concentrations to be effective, such as antibiotics for severe infections, can be delivered only through infusion.
While increasing drug concentration can help make sure enough molecules are binding to the correct sites to have a therapeutic effect, it also increases binding to nontarget sites and the risk of side effects.
One way to get a high drug concentration in the right location is to apply the drug right where it’s needed, like rubbing an ointment onto a skin rash or using eyedrops for allergies. While some drug molecules will eventually get absorbed into the bloodstream, they will be diluted enough that the amount of drug that reaches other sites is very low and unlikely to cause side effects.
Similarly, an inhaler delivers the drug directly to the lungs and avoids affecting the rest of the body.
Patient compliance
Finally, a key aspect in all drug design is to simply get patients to take medications in the right amounts at the right time.
Because remembering to take a drug several times a day is difficult for many people, researchers try to design drug formulations so they need to be taken only once a day or less.
Similarly, pills, inhalers, or nasal sprays are more convenient than an infusion that requires traveling to a clinic for a trained clinician to inject it into your arm.
The less troublesome and expensive it is to administer a drug, the more likely it is that patients will take their medication when they need it.
However, sometimes infusions or injections are the only effective way that certain drugs can be administered.
Even with all the science that goes into understanding a disease well enough to develop an effective drug, it is often up to the patient to make it all work as designed.
Tom Anchordoquy, Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
I was at a college party the first time I heard it: “If you break the seal,” my friend said darkly, “you’ll break the deal.” I was on my way to the bathroom, a standard and reasonable journey we all undertake multiple times per day—but, according to party legend, one that should put off as long as possible when consuming alcohol. The thinking is that once you pee for the first time while drinking, you’ll then have to pee a bunch more times in quick succession.
Is there any actual science behind this good-time lore?
No, you’re not “breaking” any seal
While it stands to reason you’ll pee a lot if you drink a lot—whether your beverages are alcoholic or otherwise—there is just no proof you’ll pee more after your first trip to the bathroom. Urologist Dr. Petar Bajic has summed up the issue like so: “To be clear, there is no seal that you’re protecting.”
Please consider what you know about anatomy. Where and how would such a seal—activated only when you’re throwing back shots or chugging a beer—actually function? Use your sober brain to ponder this puzzle so your drunk brain doesn’t have to.
You will pee more when drinking, but not because of a “seal”
Bajic pointed out that the average bladder is “pear-sized,” so it makes sense that the more liquid you consume, the more often you’ll need to go let it out. More frequent trips to the facilities on any given night make even more sense when you consider that alcohol is a diuretic, which means it increases urine production. You’re drinking a bunch of liquid and imbibing diuretics; of course you’re going to need to take a whizz more often than you normally would. That has nothing to do with what Bajic calls “the legendary seal”—because, again, the seal does not exist.
If you want to get deeper into the science of why you’re peeing so much at the club, you can go further: Alcohol suppresses the release of vasopressin, an antidiuretic hormone that would normally tell your kidneys to absorb fluids and distribute the rest out to your body. Per Healthline, the vasopressin suppression is notable because you’ll be producing more urine than usual and peeing out your fluid reserves.
This is why you should drink water on nights out. All that fluid depletion leads to dehydration—and if you drink enough to get a nasty little hangover, dehydration will only make you feel worse.
Don’t fall victim to an urban legend
People are suggestible. Drunk people can be even more so. Now is the time to do away with your adhesion to this urban legend in the same way you’ve matured out of believing that the order in which you consume certain types of alcohol will somehow impact your likelihood of barfing. At some point, you learned that moderation—not ordering a ton of drinks in a very specific order—was the key to staying puke-free, and yet the equally bogus myth of the seal has persisted. A pity.
SpaceX’s first tourist flight seemed to go swimmingly last month, but there was a hidden problem beneath the floorboards.
That issue came from the bathroom — the toilet tucked away in the Crew Dragon spaceship’s ceiling, which is shrouded in proprietary secrecy. A tube carrying urine from that toilet broke loose in an area beneath the spaceship’s cabin floor, releasing its contents onto a fan. That fan is used to create suction for the toilet, which is necessary because when you’re doing in microgravity, there’s no force pulling waste in any one direction. The fan then sprayed the pee all over the hidden compartment.
Even though all of this happened in microgravity, the pee didn’t drift into the cabin. That kept it away from the spaceship’s four passengers: billionaire Jared Isaacman, geoscientist Dr. Sian Proctor, physician-assistant Hayley Arceneaux, and engineer Chris Sembroski. While they orbited Earth for three days, on a mission called Inspiration4, they didn’t notice the issue, SpaceX representatives told reporters on Monday.
The Inspiration4 crew poses in front of the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spaceship that will launch them into space.
Inspiration4/John Kraus
“We didn’t really even notice it, the crew didn’t even notice it, until we got back,” SpaceX official Bill Gerstenmaier said in a press conference Monday, according to The New York Times. “When we got the vehicle back, we looked under the floor and saw the fact that there was contamination underneath the floor of Inspiration4.”
A mechanical issue with the toilet fan had, however, set off an alarm while Inspiration4 was in orbit, prompting the passengers to troubleshoot, Isaacman told CNN Business in September. He did not reveal how they solved the problem. Upon the spaceship’s return to Earth, SpaceX technicians opened the cabin floor to investigate the fan issue. That’s when they discovered the pee leak.
As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has promised on Twitter, the toilet system is getting an upgrade. SpaceX is redesigning the leaky tube beneath Crew Dragon’s floor for its next launch, which will carry four NASA astronauts to the International Space Station this weekend. With the new upgrade, the tube shouldn’t come “unglued” again, Gerstenmaier said.
Pee is also loose in another SpaceX spaceship
Another Crew Dragon capsule is currently attached to the space station, since it carried four astronauts to the space station in April and is waiting to carry them back to Earth in the coming weeks. But it has the same plumbing system as the capsule that suffered a leak.
The Crew-2 astronauts during a training session in Hawthorne, California. Left to right: Thomas Pesquet, Megan McArthur, Shane Kimbrough, and Akihiko Hoshide.
SpaceX
Fearing the same toilet troubles, SpaceX asked the astronauts on the space station to snake a camera on a cable into the pee-tube compartment beneath the floor. Sure enough, they discovered the same issue as Inspiration4.
“Yes, there was some indication of some contamination under the floor,” Gerstenmaier said.
That could be a more serious issue for this spaceship, which has been in Earth’s orbit for nearly six months, and has presumably been carrying loose urine the whole time.
After astronauts pee, that urine gets mixed with a substance called Oxone, which removes ammonia so that it doesn’t build up in the air. But Oxone can be corrosive, so SpaceX is investigating the possibility that the Oxone-pee mixture could have damaged the spaceship after months of floating around beneath its cabin floor.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
Britta Pedersen / POOL / AFP via Getty Images
SpaceX engineers tested this theory on the ground, Gerstenmaier said, according to the Times, by gathering some aluminum parts similar to those on the spaceship and soaking them in an oxone-urine mixture. The engineers put those parts in a chamber that imitates the humidity conditions of the space station. They left them there for “an extended period of time,” Gerstenmaier said, though he did not specify for how long.
So far, SpaceX has not found significant corrosion in those samples.
“Luckily, or, on purpose, we chose an aluminum alloy that is very insensitive to corrosion,” Gerstenmaier said.
He also noted that there is less urine inside the Crew Dragon capsule that’s attached to the ISS, since those astronauts were only on the spaceship for about 24 hours before they docked to the space station.
SpaceX’s on-the-ground testing is still ongoing.
“We’ll double check things, we’ll triple checks things, and we got a couple more samples we’ll pull out of the chambers and inspect,” Gerstenmaier said, according to CNN. “But we’ll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return.”
Aerial view of the Tortuga island, in the south of the Caribbean Sea, Venezuela. This is where the family’s boat capsized. Juan Barreton/AFP via Getty Images
A Venezuelan mother died while saving her children after a boat they were on capsized this month.
While drifting on a lifeboat for days, Mariely Chacón drank her own urine to breastfeed her kids.
Rescuers found the children, aged 2 and 6, clinging to their mother, who died of dehydration.
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A woman from Venezuela has been hailed a hero for keeping her children alive after the boat they were on capsized, leaving them all to drift in the sea for four days, Newsweek reported.
Mariely Chacón, her husband, and their two children, aged 6 and 2, were on a pleasure cruise from Higuerote to Tortuga island, Venezuela, with five other people when a large wave split the boat’s hull apart on September 3.
The incident forced the group to spend four days adrift on a small lifeboat in the scorching sun.
To keep her children alive, Chacón drank her urine, which allowed her to breastfeed them, Newsweek reported.
The children, identified as Jose David and Maria Beatriz Camblor Chacón, were discovered alive by rescuers earlier this week. They were found clinging to their mother, who had died from dehydration.
“The mother who died kept her children alive by breastfeeding them and drinking her own urine,” a spokesman for Instituto Nacional de los Espacios Acuáticos (INEA) said, according to the New York Post. “She died three or four hours before the rescue from dehydration after drinking no water for three days.”
The children’s nanny, 25-year-old Veronica Martinez, was also found alive on the lifeboat. She was treated for first-degree burns and dehydration, according to the New York Post.
The other five people, including the children’s father, have not yet been found. The INEA spokesperson said there is very little chance of finding them.
Chacón’s death has shocked the nation. Her funeral was held on September 11 and was broadcast on YouTube.
Her father, Humberto Chacón, said the pleasure cruise was “simply a family trip to entertain the children,” according to Newsweek.
Singapore’s State Courts seen on 21 April 2020. (PHOTO: Dhany Osman / Yahoo News Singapore)
SINGAPORE — A domestic helper accused of mixing her menstrual blood and urine into her former employer’s food claimed trial on Monday (23 August), with her male employer testifying that he had received messages from her ex-boyfriend allegedly alerting him to the incidents.
Canares Rowena Ola, a 44-year-old Filipina, however, denied ever committing the offences and claimed through her lawyer that she had lied to her ex-boyfriend about the disgusting acts. She claimed trial to one count of mischief.
The male employer, who took the stand as the first prosecution witness on Monday, was unable to pinpoint the date or time that the acts were allegedly committed, as the food was consumed long before the police report was made in December 2019.
The software engineer cannot be named due to a gag order protecting his identity. The prosecution applied for the gag order due to the nature of the crime, which might cause embarrassment to the alleged victim or his family.
The court heard from the male employer that the family employed Canares in May 2017. The family had no complaints with regard to her performance until the alleged incident came to light. She stayed in her own room within the flat, which she shared with the man, his wife, their two young children, and the man’s mother in law.
Canares was tasked to care of her employer’s children, and to cook the family’s three meals. She was free to buy any ingredients she wanted, and would at times cook her own food, while cooking separately for the family.
Asked by the prosecution why he decided to lodge a complaint, the man said that around 11.14pm on 15 December 2019, he received a message from an unknown number. He recognised the man in the display picture as the maid’s ex-boyfriend, as Canares had shown him his picture before.
“He sent messages saying that she put menstrual blood and urine in the family’s food. Then I was shocked, he sent a message to both me and my wife,” he said. The ex-boyfriend has since died.
As it was late, the man did not confront Canares, but went to the police station to lodge a complaint. About an hour or two later, two police officers arrived at his house to investigate the matter. The officers woke Canares to speak to her.
“At one point of time she mentioned that she did it…I heard she had done it, mixing these two things into our food, and she said ‘sorry’ many times to me and my wife,” he added.
One or two days later, the man said that he and his wife questioned the maid on why and how she mixed her menstrual blood and urine into their food. He was, however, unable to get specific details.
He also asked if she would do the same thing to her own children, and she said “no sir, no sir”.
He ended up throwing his and his wife lunch boxes away, as well as some utensils.
While she was under investigation, Canares was no longer made to do chores, but continued staying with the man as the man could not find her alternative living arrangements, despite approaching the Philippines Embassy. Asked why he did so, the man said he was “scared” that she was in his residence.
“I was hoping that they can do something about her stay. Either in Singapore or somewhere else, I was hoping that she was out of my house as soon as possible.”
The helper remained in his residence but kept mostly to her room and was not allowed to enter the kitchen alone, even though she was free to move around and out of the house. On 26 December 2019, the man took her to the police station for an interview, and had not seen her since then.
Canares’ lawyer Kalaithasan Karuppaya, however, argued that the maid never mixed her menstrual blood or urine into the family’s food, and that she had lied to her ex-boyfriend.
In reply, the man said, “It’s not just these messages, they were not just the starting point, but after that she accepted (responsibility for the offences by saying so) to me and my wife many times, she apologised many times. Repeatedly she has accepted (responsibility by) saying ‘sorry sorry sorry sorry’.”
However, Karuppaya maintained that his client was simply apologising generally for the inconvenience caused to her employers.
“I put it to you, my instruction, what she has told me, she apologised…she say ‘sorry sir sorry ma’am’, to you on 15 December 2019 for causing you all trouble in the middle of the night,” said the lawyer. The man responded that he had “no opinion” about that statement.
The lawyer added that on the day her two employers confronted her on how and why she had allegedly done the act,the maid was afraid of the man and hence did not deny doing the act.
“You spoke to her in angry tone and she was afraid to answer to you. She was scared to answer you,” said Karuppaya.
The man denied using an angry tone, saying the maid was seated comfortably.
Karuppaya continued, “Whatever answers she has provided, is given to you, were untrue and given in a confused state. She was confused out of fear,” said the lawyer. The man replied that he could not answer to the maid’s feelings at that point in time.
On how his family felt after the alleged incident, the man said they no longer hired a domestic helper and the chores were shared between the three adults.
“We did not want to trust a third (party) in our house with our food from then on,” he said.
An investigation officer who handled the case testified that he had spoken to Canares’ ex-boyfriend and took his statement at a hospital on 20 January last year, where the ex-boyfriend was warded for stage four cancer. This was after he received information that the ex-boyfriend was the one who had asked her to mix her blood and urine into her employer’s food.
“He denied any involvement, it was just a conversation he had with the accused stating that she did put her menstrual blood and urine into her employer’s food,” said the IO.
The trial continues on Monday.
If convicted of committing mischief, Canares may be jailed up to two years, or fined, or both.
