49 Confirmed Dead in Food Poisoning Case in East China

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, September 17, 2002

49 Confirmed Dead in Food Poisoning Case in East China

A total of 49 people are confirmed dead in the food poisoning case in a town near east China's Nanjing city. Sources with the municipal government told CRI that most of the fatalities were children; two soldiers were also among the dead. The authorities have yet to announce an official death toll.

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Most of the 300 people hospitalized after eating food contaminated with rat poison were in a stable condition Monday.

Heshengyuan Soybean Milk Shop, which is believed to have supplied the food to the victims, remained closed Monday while its boss was being questioned by police.

But the authorities refused to speculate Monday on how the poison got into the food. government officials, police hospital administrators wouldnot divulge the death toll from the tragedy.

Initial investigations in Nanjing point to a commonly-used rat poison as the most likely cause of the incident on Saturday, which has caused an undetermined number of deaths.

Zhou Qiang, an information official with the Jiangsu provincial government, says the poison could have been deliberately put into the food by someone. Public security authorities are still looking into the case. Police were questioning the manager of a company that supplied food to the shop.

About 400 students from four schools and workers on a construction site in Tangshan, a small town close to Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu Province, showed serious symptoms of poisoning on Saturday morning immediately after they had eaten fried dough sticks, sesame cakes and glutinous rice served by Heshengyuan.

"The conditions of the patients are stable and hopefully most of them will be discharged soon," said a doctor at Gulou Hospital, who declined to give her name. But she added that a few victims in her hospital were still in danger.

The China Cuisine Association demanded catering businesses carry out strict examinations to ensure food hygiene and security.

"Catering enterprises must look for loopholes in their work and eliminate potential dangers,'' the statement read.

Two other cases of food poisoning occurred on the same day as the one in Tangshan.

One broke out on Saturday evening at a factory in Jiangning District of Nanjing after 33 workers ate supper at the factory canteen. They soon showed symptoms of food poisoning and were taken to a local hospital.

Their illness was later attributed to a kind of sea fish which contains a certain amount of poison and all 33 people had been discharged from hospital by midnight.

The other case happened at a birthday dinner in a restaurant in Nanjing city when 10 diners began to feel sick several hours after the dinner, vomiting and having loose bowel movements. It was found out that rotten food was the cause.

The local hygiene department will reportedly conduct an overall examination of small restaurants and snack shops with officials warning diners not to eat in those unclean restaurants.

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