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2016 Irkutsk mass methanol poisoning

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2016 Irkutsk mass methanol poisoning (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

As of 19 August 2024, 23:20 (UTC), this page is active and open for discussion. An FAC coordinator will be responsible for closing the nomination.
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Nominator(s): Ed [talk] [OMT] 06:10, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just before Christmas in 2016, dozens of people in the Russian city of Irkutsk woke up to discover that they could no longer see. Others never woke at all.

It quickly became clear that these people were suffering from methanol poisoning after drinking a contaminated batch of unregulated surrogate alcohol. In the end, 74 people died—a toll that the Associated Press called "unprecedented in its scale"—and the Russian government took a few actions to try to prevent it from happening again.

I wrote the original draft of this article in 2016 after I read this New York Times article. I successfully nominated it for ITN in the same month and GA in mid-2017. I'm looking forward to any comments you might share. Ed [talk] [OMT] 06:10, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Sodium

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  • Shouldn't the first section be named something like "Background"
    • Done
  • Nikishin, thea vodka historian -- Also define a "vodka historian", that's not a phrase most people associate with a profession
    • "The" is meant to refer to the earlier mention of Nikishin. I adopted that phrasing from news articles because I liked how it split the difference between repeating full names and professions vs. hoping people remembered the first reference. Would refactoring "vodka historian" as "historian of vodka" make things more clear?
  • I'm not really sure about the fact that the concept of methanol poisoning is defined in the article after two or three references to methanol poisoning itself.
    • I struggled with this one. I definitely see where you're coming from, but the background section is discussing the issues related to alcoholism and surrogate alcohols in Russia—not necessarily methanol poisoning. I did remove one sentence that improperly conflated the two, and I'm open to removing the rest of the info given about alcohol poisoning. That's different from methanol poisoning and may be confusing to readers in this context.
  • The two alcohols are similar in many respects and cannot readily be distinguished, and their contents differed from the labels on the bottles, which indicated that they contained ethanol. An investigation later revealed that the methanol was usually used in the local production of windshield washer fluid, known locally as antifreeze. I'm confused here, were the bottles mislabelled or was it that windshield washer fluid was used because it was cheaper (as you mention in paragraphs before) ?
    • Both. The bad batch was placed into the standard bath oil bottles, which were labeled as containing ethanol.
  • Who conducted said investigation ?
    • Fixed. It was the government.
  • A picture of ethanol v/s methanol bottles would drive the point home for the first paragraph of the "Events" section
    • If I'm understanding this ask correctly, we unfortunately don't have freely licensed photos of these bottles. That's why I used {{external media}} near the top. The ethanol and methanol bottles were the same per above. Never mind. I assume you mean a photo of ethanol vs. methanol to drive home how similar they are. There isn't anything on Commons in one photo, but I've reached out to WP:CHEMISTRY.
  • drinking too much non-fraudulent ethanol-based bath oil Whether or not this incident was caused by actual fraud is explicitly never addressed in the article, I would advise you to figure that out and tweak the wording of this sentence or add more context accordingly.
    • Fixed. This was a really good flag, and I can't believe I didn't see this myself!
  • Of the remainder, a problem in attempting to treat them was that fomepizole, a methanol antidote, is not certified for use in Russia and is therefore not available in the country's hospitals. This sentence feels stilted
    • Fixed, I hope.
  • Overall, the victims included teachers, nurses, and drivers; The New York Times described the majority as holding "steady if low-paying jobs".
    • Fixed.
  • What is "counterfeit oil" in About 500 liters (130 U.S. gal) of remaining counterfeit oil were seized from the underground facility where it had been produced, does it refer to the methanol laced oil or the bath oil which turned into vodka in general ?
    • The former. I hope this is now fixed; I discovered that I had read the reference wrong and that the 500 liters were seized from local shops in addition to authorities discovering the underground facility.
    • Hello Sohom Datta and thanks so much for giving this a read. I've left comments inline above. Ed [talk] [OMT] 14:53, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Image review from Nikkimaria

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Comments from Graeme Bartlett

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  • Instead of "the Associated Press news agency" statement, we should have our own Wikipedia statement on whether this was the biggest mass poisoning in (Russia). THough it could be used as a reference.
    • I have not seen a reference that compares mass poisonings in Russia, unfortunately, and for methanol specifically List of methanol poisoning incidents#Russia only shows several other incidents from 2021 and 2023. The full quote is: "Poisonings caused by cheap surrogate alcohol are a regular occurrence, but the Irkutsk case was unprecedented in its scale." I've expanded the lead and better clarified what the quote is referring to?
  • We could explain that "Боярышник" means hawthorn.
    • Done.
  • A quote from Alexander Nikishin should probably be reworded in Wikipedia voice.
    • Done.
  • 4 deaths → four deaths MOS:NUM
    • Done.
  • Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:03, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Graeme Bartlett: Thank you—I really appreciate the thorough review and time you spent reading the article. I've responded inline above. I also would love to confirm with you that this newly added/tweaked sentence is accurate: "The human body breaks down methanol into formaldehyde and formic acid, both of which act as nerve toxins and damage the optic nerve." 'Nerve toxins' is the phrase used by DW, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't being used improperly. Ed [talk] [OMT] 23:20, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Penitentes

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  • The number of affected people could go in the lead.
    • Done.
  • According to early reports on 19 December, a total of 57 people were hospitalized - Is this the earliest known point at which people fell ill? It's not entirely clear over what kind of time span the poisonings unfolded.
    • Thanks for pushing me on this. Previously, all the sources I'd seen didn't give an exact date... or so I thought, as this journal article did give a start date. I've added it.
  • In the immediate aftermath of the poisoning, a state of emergency was declared. - Who declared the state of emergency? Was it municipal authorities, the Siberian regional government, or a higher power? That would eliminate the passive voice, too. I would also include the date.
    • It was the mayor of Irkutsk! Good catch.
  • The article defines Rospotrebnadzor as the federal consumer rights protection agency in both the Background section and the Aftermath section. The latter definition can probably be removed!
    • I'm split on this. There's a big gap between mention #1 and #2, and I don't like to assume that readers go through articles in order from top to bottom.

Overall, a solid article! — Penitentes (talk) 19:53, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Penitentes: Thanks so much for the review! I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I've responded to your comments inline. Ed [talk] [OMT] 23:20, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from BorgQueen

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UC

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An interesting story -- maybe short of a full review, but some things that stuck out to me as I read:

  • Make sure that Russian and transliterated text are in the appropriate templates, for the benefit of screen readers.
    • Done.
  • Russia's government agency devoted to consumer protection, Rospotrebnadzor, recorded about 36,000 such poisonings in the first nine months of 2016, resulting in over 9,000 deaths.: we need to put this figure in context -- how did that compare with previous figures? How much confidence do we have that Putin's government would report this accurately?
    • I included this as a way of showing the scale of the problem, and not to prove the preceding statement around increasing deaths over time. I'm open to removing it. To your second question, in several areas of the article I've tried to be very specific when the information's source is either the state or state-owned media.
      • Even just to show the scale, it needs some kind of context -- it's obviously a big number, and a single death is a tragedy, but 9,000 deaths a year in Wales would be a different proposition to 9,000 deaths in China. I think showing change over time would be one good way to do this: otherwise, was this the largest in the world? UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:34, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • I decided to remove this in place of a note around alcohol poisonings being generally high in Russia prior to the increase. I went looking for additional sources to contexualize it, but then I found that the WHO said in 2018 that "The measurement of alcohol poisoning deaths may be affected by the miscoding of alcohol poisonings as cardiovascular diseases [...] however, the miscoding of alcohol poisonings appears to be limited to the former Soviet Union". So the direct-from-government stats I was quoting are likely to be quite wrong anyway. (The new addition cites the study the WHO cited.) Ed [talk] [OMT] 02:18, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • bath oil named boyaryshnik or Боярышник, after its hawthorn scent: I think we need to spell out that Боярышник is the Russian for 'hawthorn'.
    • I believe this is fixed. I was trying to avoid repeating "hawthorn", but you were right to question the phrasing and I'm struggling to find a better solution.
  • Everybody knew that it was not bath oil", one individual later told the US newspaper The New York Times. "That label was just meant to fend off the inspectors": who is this individual? What gives them the authority to make such a sweeping pronouncement?
    • The quote is from a local that does not have any authority on their own, so I omitted the name. I decided to include it in relying on the editorial judgement of Neil MacFarquhar, who was The New York Times' Moscow bureau chief at the time and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer in 2017 for reports about Russia. I don't believe MacFarquhar would have included the quote if it wasn't effectively true.
      • I'm not happy here, I'm afraid. Journalists include sometimes quotations because they're authoritative, sure, but they also include them to add flavour, to be seen to be presenting the views of local people, or even to distance themselves from the views put forward -- it may be significant, for example, that MacFarquhar chose not to write, in his own voice, "everyone in Russia knows that the bath oil is meant to be drunk". However, I imagine it would be fairly trivial to find another source which does say that people were selling drinking alcohol as other plausibly-deniable products in Russia at this time, and that this was widely known? UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:34, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • MacFarquhar did write that in his own voice. :-p Specifically, he said: "[...] it was common knowledge that bootleggers produced the rotgut specifically as poor man's vodka". I've removed the quote and left the citation intact, as the other part of the article's preceding sentence is covered by another part of the NYT piece: "They felt they were being scapegoated for the illicit vodka trade, which the police had long tolerated, if not controlled". Ed [talk] [OMT] 02:18, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Footnotes need citations.
  • As days went by, subsequent reports increased the number of impacted people: I notice that each of these reports comes from a different source, so it's not easy to differentiate change over time versus different sources/counting methods/reliability/whatever of different news organisations.
    • I've rewritten this paragraph to use only sources that explicitly cited the local health ministry in their articles. I feel pretty confident that's the source the previous sources were using too, as none of them said they were counting in other ways, but WP:V is better satisfied in the new formulation. Thanks for calling this out!
  • We have a couple of figures given in roubles: it would help to give a sense to non-Russian readers of how much money these represent.
    • Done. {{To USD}} is a great template, or I've filled in conversions directly from the sources. If you were actually hoping to see inflation-adjusted figures, I don't think {{inflation}} can handle cross-currency conversions. I might be able to use something like Measuring Worth with citations?
  • Lots here relies on news sources from inside the news cycle, which have their concerns. Can we pull some of that information from more retrospective studies instead?
    • Solid portions rely on things published outside the news cycle. The two most significant sources used in the article are the retrospective New York Times MacFarquhar piece (15 calls) and an academic piece to give this significant attention (9 calls, +1 more with info from its appendix; I could add more citations to a table that provides a bullet list of Russian government actions during/after the poisoning, but in most cases the news articles provided more detail.). I'd also call out the Deutsche Welle article, which was published a week after the poisonings began and deliberately takes a step back to give a wide view of the incident.
    • Overall, I would argue that the in-cycle news sources are appropriately used. Many are in the incident section, as you might expect, and in the aftermath section for things like legal cases and politician pronouncements. Others have been mined for the background info they provided, thereby acting as a secondary source in that context. I'd also note that I've dropped sources that made errors while trying to catch the cycle (NPR and the now-defunct Siberian Times). That said, I've gone through to trim unnecessary references, most of which were news cycle-specific.
      • An update here a day later: I did additional digging for retrospective resources and came across a Siberian Medical Journal article in the references of another article. That hadn't shown up in my prior searching, but I've now integrated it into the article. Of note, it gives two numbers for the death toll, so I've explained the source discrepancy in a new footnote. I've also added two academic articles from 2018. Ed [talk] [OMT] 03:52, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • What is the Lachenmeier article doing in Further Reading? What does it add that hasn't been incorporated into the article?
    • I don't seem to have access to this article any more. My memory is that while it was a research synthesis follow-up on unrecorded alcohol use in Russia by the same authors as the main academic source on this poisoning, it did not have any info that I wanted to add to the article proper. I don't mind removing it if you feel strongly.
  • Similarly, why the link to Khodorkovsky's blog?
    • My thinking was it met WP:ELMAYBE #4. It's not a reliable source, but a then-prominent opposition politician's voice felt worthy of inclusion somewhere. That said, I have even less attachment to this link than the further reading one, so I'm happy to remove it if you feel strongly.
      • We might do well to incorporate it into the text -- to say "Khodorkovsky, a prominent opposition politician, said...", and link it as a source. Even better if someone else has got there first and reported the remarks at second hand, so we can then cite it to that reliable source and say "K. made his remarks on his blog, at [this place]" UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:34, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • Y'know, the note around secondary sourcing got me thinking. As far as I can tell, Khodorkovsky's article had effectively no impact. I searched and found exactly one public post on Facebook and zero on the website formerly known as Twitter. There may have been mentions in Russian opposition reporting or social media that I can't easily search for without knowing the language, but without evidence of that I removed the link. Ed [talk] [OMT] 02:18, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:00, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, UndercoverClassicist! You said that this wasn't a full review, but you nevertheless hit on some great points that I'm grateful for. You can find inline replies above. Ed [talk] [OMT] 07:21, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks again, UndercoverClassicist. I dropped more replies above. Ed [talk] [OMT] 02:18, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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