State Duma deputy from the Communist Party faction Valery Rashkin sent a request to the Prosecutor General's Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Rospotrebnadzor with an appeal to "take comprehensive measures" to prevent poisoning of children in schools and kindergartens. The parliamentarian believes that law enforcement officers should find those responsible for the mass poisoning of minors in Moscow at the end of 2018 and bring those responsible for the offenses to criminal responsibility. Rashkin also pointed to the ugly, in his opinion, organization of control over the quality of products in educational institutions, which needs to be put in order.
“Conducting appropriate procedural inspections should become a powerful impetus to prevent mass food poisoning in school and preschool educational organizations in Moscow, but the most important prerequisite for this should be the identification of the responsibility of officials at each level of control over the observance of sanitary and epidemiological rules,” Rashkin said in his address.
In the winter of 2018, in several kindergartens in Moscow, children fell ill with dysentery, as reported by their parents. In December 2018, Rospotrebnadzor confirmed the facts of infection in kindergartens in the southeast of Moscow. Rospotrebnadzor indicated cottage cheese produced at one of the light industry enterprises in the Lipetsk region as the main reason for the poisoning. Due to the poisoning of children, the court suspended the production of curd products at this plant.
“The scale of the violations revealed testifies to the disorganization of the entire system of multilevel control over the safety and quality of food in educational organizations,” the parliamentarian complained. “We have to state with regret that today's businessmen and education officials in Moscow do not have any other [besides compulsory] incentives to strive for the highest indicators of safety and quality of food in school and preschool educational organizations, which we observed in the USSR, while it is free at the same time.”
On Monday, February 11, a series of single pickets of parents of children with dysentery took place near the Moscow mayor's office. They demanded that the mayor of the capital, Sergei Sobyanin, conduct an investigation into the mass illness of preschoolers.
Some journalists believe that the supply of food to Moscow kindergartens and schools is handled by companies associated with the restaurateur Yevgeny Prigozhin, whom the media calls "Putin's chef." Journalist Daria Burlakova told the Daily Storm that she lost her job at TASS after another media outlet, Novaya Gazeta, published her investigation into the circumstances of poisoning children in kindergartens in the capital in the winter of 2018.
