PRAGUE:
At least 19 people have died and more than 20 have been hospitalised in
the Czech Republic after drinking spirits apparently tainted with
methanol, Czech officials and media said Wednesday.
The Czech
Republic announced emergency measures Wednesday as the death toll from
the methanol poisoning mounted, including two women aged 28 and 21.
Kiosks and markets were banned from selling spirits with more than 30
percent alcohol content and police raided outlets nationwide. At 410
sites, they found 70 cases of illegal alcohol.
Prime Minister Petr
Necas called on all Czechs to refrain from drinking “any alcohol whose
origin is uncertain” but authorities still feared the death toll will
rise further.
Little is officially known about the culprits other
than that they work in the country’s depressed northeast, a former
heartland of industry under communism. The Moravian-Silesian region near
the border with Poland has unemployment about 50 percent higher than
the national average of 8.3 percent.
Of the 16 confirmed dead in
the Czech Republic, eight lived in the region; two others died in
neighboring Poland and one more in Slovakia.
Senior police
official Vaclav Kucera said all the poisoning cases so far are likely
connected and two suspects have been arrested — one in the eastern city
of Zlin and another in the northeastern city of Havirov. The first two
fatalities were announced Sept. 6 in Havirov.
Methanol is mainly
used for industrial purposes but unscrupulous criminal networks
sometimes misuse it to illegally produce cheap liquor because it’s cheap
and impossible to distinguish from real drinking alcohol.
Igor
Dvoracek, a doctor in the eastern city of Ostrava, said autopsies might
be done on about 150 people who have died in recent weeks to see if they
were also victims.
The Czech Republic is world-renowned for its
high-quality pilsner beer and burgeoning wine industry and is the
world’s biggest consumer of beer per capita. In 2011, 65 million liters
of spirits were drunk in a nation of just over 10 million people.
But
the methanol scandal has shone an uncomfortable light on the darker
side of the alcohol industry — and the way some are struggling to deal
with a recession that has blighted parts of the country far away from
the wealthy tourist magnet of Prague. The export-dependent Czech economy
has been contracting since the third quarter of 2011 and only the
biggest optimists see a tepid return to growth of less than one percent
in 2013.
“People with the lowest income are looking for the
cheapest alcohol and are ready to accept unknown origins,” said Vladimir
Steiner, executive director of a union of spirits producers.
He estimated that 20 percent of all the liquor in restaurants across the country is likely made on the black market.
Last year in India, a huge outbreak of methanol poisoning killed 170 people.
Despite
the current tragedy, such outbreaks have been rare in Europe. In
Serbia, 43 people died in 1998 from illegally-made plum brandy and a man
was sentenced to 12 years in jail.