Catch it, fish

Russian sprats fell under the hot hand of Voronezh sanitary doctors

The campaign to remove Latvian-produced sprats from Russian shelves, which started in early November, also “hooked” Russian producers. The sanitary doctors of the Rospotrebnadzor department in the Voronezh region, who zealously took up the task of protecting the consumer table from poor-quality canned food from the territory of the new NATO member, also discovered harmful canned food of domestic production. Recently in Voronezh, sprats in oil produced by the fishing collective farm “For the Motherland” in the Kaliningrad region and the company “Konservprom” from Korolev near Moscow were already withdrawn from sale from sale.

Like Latvian smoked sprats previously withdrawn from the Russian market, domestic canned food does not meet the standards for the content of benzopyrene, a carcinogen formed during the smoking of fish and meat. True, domestic producers did not reach the “records” from Latvia - companies from a neighboring state supplied sprats in which the benzopyrene content sometimes exceeded the permissible levels by 37 times. The ban on the sale of Russian canned fish, according to the chief sanitary doctor of the Voronezh region, Mikhail Chubirko, “was introduced due to the fact that the content of benzopyrene in the samples taken exceeded the permissible concentrations by up to six times.” In addition, according to the results of an examination by Voronezh sanitary doctors, Kaliningrad sprat pate was also found to be suspicious, containing 1.8 times more carcinogen than it should be.

Let us recall that the all-Russian sprat phobia began precisely in the Kaliningrad region, where at the end of October Rosselkhoznadzor introduced a temporary ban on the import and sale of products from two Latvian enterprises, which, according to some estimates, accounted for up to a third of canned fish supplied to our country. In early November, Rospotrebnadzor joined the fight. A group of seven Latvian sprat producers came to the attention of Gennady Onishchenko’s department, and clearing the shelves of the Soviet people’s favorite snack began sweeping across the country. “Since benzopyrene is a chemical substance, we have given instructions to withdraw this product from sale,” the chief sanitary doctor of Russia commented on the sprat veto. And despite the fact that Mr. Onishchenko categorically denied the intention of Rospotrebnadzor to completely ban the sale of Latvian canned fish in Russia, the Russian sanitary authorities are not yet going to return Baltic sprats to the shelves. “The regulation on strengthening supervision over canned food produced in Latvia is in effect,” Lyubov Voropaeva, press secretary of Rosprirodnadzor, told a Vremya Novostei correspondent yesterday. - Negotiations are currently underway at the government level to resolve this issue. We, in turn, constantly check all food products, including sprats, and conduct laboratory tests on prohibited batches.”

True, Moscow, which was one of the first to blacklist sprats from Latvian producers, will have something to replace the import deficit, unlike Voronezh. As Vremya Novostei was told by the press service of the capital's territorial administration of Rosprirodnadzor, the situation here with domestic sprats is “calm.”

Yulia KHOMCHENKO