Article here: A woman is facing murder charges for feeding chili powder to her boyfriend’s 2-year-old daughter, who subsequently suffered a seizure and died.
Question:
What’s the connection between the chili powder and the seizure/death? Assuming this wasn’t just a case of severe food allergy, how could ingesting chili powder cause that to happen?
Inadequate info in the news article to say much about it.
I can think of several ways though; forcing so much of the hot stuff down her that it causes her to vomit, aspirate, and become hypoxic enough to seize.
Or the chemical irritation of the pepper causing severe enough bronchospasm to cause hypoxia and resultant seizure.
In each case, hypoxia would be the more likely cause of death than seizure, but both processes can lead to death.
Allergy to chili could also cause profound shock, and the dying brain could also start seizing.
I’m sure other creative medical types can think of a few other mechanisms.
Allergy to capsaicin.
Drug reaction to the capsaicin (my mom suffered from this on one of her meds).
Yeah, my WAG is the burning chili caused the child to choke, and the resulting lack of oxygen to the brain would cause the seizure.
Now I’m sad that I even had to come up with that theory. 
I would take the reports of seizure with a grain of salt - the media reports all seem to say that the authorities were called on a report of a girl suffering from a seizure. Now, I have had to call 911 to report my daughter being in status epilepticus (she’s fine now, btw) but I’m a medical professional and although I was scared absolutely shitless at the time, I knew what I was talking about.
I suspect a lot of ‘person thrashing around in process of dying’ gets reported to, or interpreted by, 911 as ‘seizure’, especially if the caller is omitting relevant facts to cover up the fact that they are the one responsible.
Sounds reasonable, but perhaps I should have written my subject line as “how does chili powder cause death?”. Qadgop has provided some possible explanations though.
Inhalation of chili powder, causing reflex laryngospasm. Laryngospasm in children can lead to cardiac arrest in under a minute. Pulmonary edema and respiratory failure can be a delayed problem if the laryngospasm resolves.