Organized crime is posing a major threat to Russia's effort to improve health and environment standards, according to the country's top health enforcement official.


"Our staff has been beaten, and armed guards often come to stop the work of our staff", said Yevgeny Belyayev, chairman of the State Sanitary-Epidemiological Inspection Committee. "Very strong Mafia and Mafia-like structures have become very active against us".


A common example, Belyayev said, was that a health inspector spotting rotting sausages in the market might demand that the vendor stop selling, only to be surrounded by a group of thugs and told to leave immediately.


Belyayev's committee, which separated from the Health Ministry last year to give it greater independence, oversees health, pollution and ecological standards for Russia, and guides the activity of regional health inspectors across the country. They have, inherited an appalling legacy of pollution and low sanitation standards.


In Moscow's center the committee's work is implemented by 28 city food inspectors who patrol the area's 3, 000 restaurants, stores, kiosks and other points dispensing food. Yet the inspectors, almost all of whom are women, complain that their monthly salary of 1, 500 rubles ($4. 40) -- a little more than the cost of a kilo of sausage -- would not support them but for their spouse's income.


"We have the lowest pay yet a great responsibility", said Lyudmila Frolova, who travels between inspection points by foot or metro since her department cannot afford its own vehicles.


Paying inspectors poverty wages creates conditions ripe for corruption, Belyayev acknowledged.


"There is a possibility of corruption", he said. "This is one of the factors that hinders our work".


To highlight the shortcomings in the current health and environmental inspection system, Belyayev and other government officials have made a series of presentations in recent months to highlight, Russia's "very grave environmental situation" inherited from the Communist past.


Scores of Russian cities, including Krasnoyarsk and Magnitogorsk, sport pollution levels 10 times the normal limits, he said.


Nationwide, 12 percent of all drinking water samples show dangerously high levels of bacteria, and as much as 6 percent of agricultural crops are infected with much higher levels of pesticides than acceptable.


As a result, birth rates are falling, deaths rates increasing, and the average life expectancy -- 69. 4 years -- is lower than it was in 1970, Belyayev said.


Even though the government is speaking about environmental and health problems more openly than the Communist rulers ever did, new capitalists and old bureaucrats are hindering the clean up process, Belyayev said.


"There are many businessmen that want no control over them, and nobody wants to invest their money for pollution prevention", he said. "Such people create all the obstacles they can against our services".


The inertia of Communist-trained bureaucrats also slows down the effort to create nationwide health and sanitary standards, Belyayev said.


"It is difficult for our specialists to learn how to work in the new environment", he explained. "It is harder to work with private enterprises because they don't know the laws and legislative health standards, and we have to teach them".