62 Die in Siberia After Drinking Counterfeit Bath Oil

— -- At least 62 people have died in a Siberian city after drinking counterfeit bath oil as a substitute for alcohol. The deaths began over the weekend in the city of Irkutsk in Russia’s far east, after dozens died in a matter of hours.

Almost 40 people remain hospitalized after drinking the oils, the region’s health ministry said.

According to investigators, the victims drank a bath oil that has become a popular substitute for cheap vodkas. The oils, called Boyaryshnik, contain labels that warn users not to consume the product. But investigators said a batch of the product in the region appeared to have contained methanol, a highly toxic form of alcohol that is potentially lethal to ingest.

Sold widely in small shops, the result has been a death toll equivalent to an airliner crash.

In an attempt to halt the poisonings, the region's governor declared a state of emergency and ordered mass seizures of counterfeit alcohol, with police raiding dozens of locations, looking for the bath oils and other surrogate spirits.

Police said they had arrested 12 people involved in the production or sale of the lethal oil, and had seized thousands of liters of the product and other counterfeit spirits. A police spokesman said the oil had been produced in an illegal factory.

Today, Irkutsk’s mayor, Dmitry Berdnikov, said he hoped authorities had cut off the source of the poisoning.

“Cases of victims being delivered to hospitals have become piecemeal. We want to believe that we’ve made a breakthrough in the situation,” Berdnikov told the Interfax news agency.

The deaths have summoned memories of the darkest periods of the 1990s for many Russians, when such mass poisoning and desperate alcoholism became terrible hallmarks of post-Communist Russia. Then, dire living standards, mass unemployment and the vanishing of state oversight led to a boom in surrogate alcohols, accompanied by mass poisonings as Russians found themselves drinking moonshines sometimes mixed with de-icer and cleaning products.

Improvement in the economy and a crackdown on counterfeit liquors has seen a significant decline in such incidents, but recently the scourge has appeared to return as Russia’s economy has tanked under falling oil prices and Western sanctions. The disaster in Irkutsk is the worst in a series of mass poisonings involving surrogate alcohol over the past year, with people seeming to turn once again to cheap substitutes as living standards have been pushed down and the price of genuine liquors has jumped due to a fall in the value of Russia's currency.

Prices in Russia have risen sharply, pushing up poverty once again. Since 2014, an additional 2 million Russians have slipped below the poverty line, according to Russia’s national statistics office. Alcoholism also remains a severe problem in Russia, and a 2012 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found 30 percent of deaths in the country were alcohol-related.

The catastrophe in Irkutsk is being seen by many as a reminder of how the crisis is biting the poor. The cheapest vodkas are priced at $3, while the bath oil costs 65 cents. The rise in prices has led to a surge in the amount of surrogate alcohol being sold -- to the extent that Russia's finance ministry announced it was developing measures to lower the minimum price of vodka even further to try and head off people buying dangerous alternatives.

Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the government to strengthen legislation controlling the sale of products such as perfumes, cosmetics and cleaners that contain high levels of alcohol. Russian state television has swung into action airing large-scale coverage of what it says are police operations seizing tons of counterfeit alcohol at border crossings and in shops.

Russia’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in a cabinet meeting on Monday also demanded a ban on the cheap lotions and perfumes containing high percentages of spirits.

“This is a complete disgrace and clearly we should put an end to it,” Medvedev said.