World's oldest person dies at 116

QUITO, Ecuador - The world's oldest person, a 116-year-old Ecuadorean woman who drank donkey milk for health, died on Sunday less than a month before her birthday, her relatives told local newspapers yesterday.

Maria Esther de Capovilla was declared the world's oldest person in December by Guinness World Records, taking the title from a US woman.

Capovilla was born in Guayaquil in western Ecuador on September 14, 1889, the same year that Adolf Hitler was born and the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated, and lived in a ritzy neighbourhood with her daughter-in-law and son.

Relatives attributed her astonishingly long life to regular doses of donkey's or goat's milk, glasses of wine and a quiet life dedicated to her family.

Her eyesight was good up to the end and she never needed glasses, they said.

As a girl at the turn of the century, Capovilla liked to go to parties but never drank alcohol. At the time it was the custom for women to touch the rim of the glass with their lips without drinking, as a sign of accepting hospitality, her family said.

Capovilla died of complications from pneumonia at a local hospital, relatives said.

She had five children, 11 grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren, according to local media.

Elizabeth Bolden, from Memphis, Tennessee, born August 15, 1890, had previously been regarded as the oldest living person.

"She's probably the oldest person alive right now, but that's up to Guinness to announce," said Stanley Primmer, the head of Super centenarian Research Foundation, a nonprofit group that studies longevity in Pittsburgh.

A Guinness spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

In May, friends and relatives of a woman in San Augustin, El Salvador, gathered to celebrate what national records indicated was her 128th birthday. Cruz Hernandez was born on May 3, 1878, according to the records.

National birth registry officials sent Hernandez's documents to Guinness last year but have yet to hear from the organisation.

Guinness says the oldest "fully authenticated" age to which any human has ever lived is 122 years and 164 days. Jeanne Louise Calment was born in France on February 21, 1875, and died on August 4, 1997.

- REUTERS