ISTANBUL: The death toll from people drinking tainted alcohol in Istanbul jumped to 37, the governor’s office said Monday.

“Thirty-seven people died and 17 others are still receiving treatment” over six weeks, the governor’s office said.

It said a total of 77 people had been poisoned since November 1, 23 of whom had been treated and discharged.

On December 4, Turkish media said 17 people had died from drinking tainted alcohol in Istanbul, while 22 others were being treated in hospital.

Alcohol tainted with methanol is thought to be the cause, methanol being a toxic substance that can be added to liquor to increase its potency but which can cause blindness, liver damage and death.

Alcohol poisoning kills 17 in Turkey

Poisonings from adulterated alcohol are quite common in Turkiye, where private production has exploded as authorities have cranked up taxes on alcoholic drinks.

The most commonly faked product is raki, Turkiye’s aniseed-flavoured national beverage whose price has shot up to around 1,300 lira ($37.20) a litre in supermarkets.

The minimum wage in Turkiye is 17,000 lira ($489) a month.

The authorities also fined 32 businesses for supplying fake alcohol, hitting them with a collective fine of 2.6 million Turkish lira ($76,200).

The governor’s office said police had arrested 14 people in connection with supplying the tainted alcohol and seized 14,701 bottles of suspect liquor.

Turkiye’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been accused of trying to Islamise society in the officially secular state, has often criticised the consumption of alcohol and tobacco.

At the end of 2021, at least 25 people died over the space of a few days in several different regions. A year before that, around 40 people died of alcohol poisoning.