Bihar: The mysterious death of over 100 children in a year in northern India has now been linked to eating lychees. For more than two decades, healthy children in Bihar suffered sudden health complication and died subsequently, leaving doctors baffled.

Shocking but true, new research published in medical journal The Lancet hints that they may have been poisoned by lychee.

The children who died mysteriously hailed from poor families, specifically from the lychee producing pockets of Bihar. These children had consumed lychees on empty stomach, which many have triggered a condition leading to their death.

Lychees contain toxins that inhibit the body’s ability to produce glucose, which affected young children whose blood sugar levels were already low because they were not eating dinner. They woke screaming in the night before suffering convulsions and losing consciousness as they suffered acute swelling of the brain.

The researchers who examined the sick children in Muzaffarpur between May and July, 2014 found similarity between a outbreak of sickness that caused dwelling and convulsion in children in the Carribean, which was caused by the ackee fruit, which contained hypoglycin, a toxin that prevents the body from making glucose. Tests then showed that lychees also contained hypoglycin.

Children suffering symptoms associated with the outbreak should be rapidly treated for hypoglycaemia, or low blood sugar, officials said.

The number of reported cases of the sickness has since fallen from hundreds each year to about 50, the New York Times reported.