48 Dead

MOSCOW — At least 48 people died in the Siberian city of Irkutsk after consuming hawthorn-scented bath lotion containing methanol as a cheap substitute for the ethanol in standard alcoholic beverages, the Russian authorities said on Monday.

As the death toll climbed throughout the day, a local prosecutor, Stanislav Zubovsky, told the Interfax news agency that a total of 57 people were known to have consumed the deadly liquid over the weekend.

Consumption of surrogate alcohol is widespread in Russia, particularly in the struggling districts outside the more prosperous cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The sheer number of victims in Irkutsk evoked memories of the years of lawlessness, poverty and social depression that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Russian government’s consumer rights watchdog agency reported in January that alcohol abuse was implicated in the premature death of 30 percent of men and 15 percent of women in the country.

The victims, identified in a local TV report as men and women between 35 and 55 years old, have been hospitalized since Saturday night. They were all residents of the Leninsky district in the outskirts of Irkutsk, a city of 620,000 people more than 2,600 miles east of Moscow.

The liquid was sold in local stores for around a dollar a bottle, compared with about $3 for a half-liter bottle of vodka.

Methanol is a highly toxic version of alcohol, commonly used as antifreeze. The bottle was marked as not fit for internal use, but that did not seem to faze the pensioners, students and others who bought it regularly, according to a report by the local version of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper.

It was unclear what went wrong with the batch distributed over the weekend. Local investigators detained seven people on suspicion of distributing the liquid and discovered a workshop where they said the substance was produced. Around 2,000 bottles of it were seized from local stores.

Thought moonshine Vodka is all over the place !

Dem people drink anything that has alcohol in the small print. Bay Rum would shift like beer in that country.