Bath lotion drinking deaths in Siberia mounted to 41 after poor residents in Irkutsk drank the liquid as a cheap substitute for alcohol, according to investigators.
"According to our latest data 41 of 57 people who were hospitalized after drinking the liquid have died," investigators said, according to Reuters. "More than 2,000 units of the liquid have been confiscated with an overall volume of 500 liters."
Police found a workshop that made the hawthorn-scented liquid along with various brands of counterfeit vodka, according to Agence France-Presse. Two of the workshop's owners and five people believed to have sold the substance were detained.
Authorities told AFP that inexpensive perfumes and facial toners containing alcohol also were sold without the same trading restrictions imposed on alcoholic drinks. The purchasers were usually the most socially disadvantaged.
While homemade alcoholic drinks are popular throughout Russia, they are also blamed for a large number of deaths, noted AFP. Authorities said that the Irkutsk victims ranged in age from 35 and 50 years old.
The cases illustrates the alcoholic drinking challenges in Russia. A study published in Lancet in 2014 followed 150,000 Russians for up to a decade after asking them how much vodka they drank, reported the Washington Post.
The study found that men who drank three or more bottles of vodka per week were roughly twice as likely to die prematurely as men who drank less than a bottle per week.
"Russian death rates have fluctuated wildly over the past 30 years as alcohol restrictions and social stability varied under Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin, and the main thing driving these wild fluctuations in death was vodka," said the study's co-author, Sir Richard Peto of the University of Oxford in Britain.