Hello and thank you for downloading witnesses on the BBC World Service with me Rachel Gilman.

Today I'm taking you back to September 2001 when the small Estonian city of Parnu was hit by a massive outbreak of alcohol poisoning that caused dozens of deaths.

I've been speaking to Dr. Rido Pasma who was working in the town when the first cases were discovered.

It was Sunday. the town when the first cases were discovered.

It was Sunday and I was at home when I listened from my colleagues who called me that they

had already several cases with similar poisonings.

And they need some help, and they suspect it that it might be poisoning with methanol.

Methanol, an industrial chemical widely used in the manufacture of plastics and even

antifreeze, not ethanol, the chemical distilled to make alcoholic spirits.

The news soon came through that hundreds of liters of methanol had been stolen from a nearby

factory and used to make cheap illegal vodka which local sellers had been

distributing around Parnu. The hospital needed all the help it could get.

I went to hospital and are almost for a week. In nights I try to go back home at least to sleep a little bit.

It was of course overwhelmed because in our hospitals this time there was about 100 beds,

but when you see that there was days where came more than 40, 50 patients, new patients. It was very heavy load of new patients.

Local emergency services were stretched to breaking point and scores of patients were transferred to the Estonian capital for further treatment.

Every level of society in Parnu was affected.

It was of course huge social catastrophe also.

Parano is not very large community so I thought that there must be something wrong. It was a little bit unbelievable. And we

hope that maybe it's only for a few cases and that's it. But when we saw second and third

days that patients are coming and coming and coming,

it was, then we recognized that it might be large.

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