Apparently, it started in Middle school students.
The Chinese government ordered police to investigate a mass food poisoning in the eastern city of Nanjing that reportedly killed scores of people, many of them middle school students.
Government officials and hospitals on Sunday refused to give an account of deaths in the poisonings, which were traced to a snack shop in Tangshan county, a rural district of Nanjing city. The Communist Party’s national headquarters in Beijing and China’s Cabinet ordered health officials to Nanjing to investigate.
More than 200 people had been poisoned and “a number” had died, according to reports in the government-controlled media. Police must make “the most strenuous efforts” to uncover the cause of the poisonings, official newspapers said.
Newspapers in Hong Kong put the death toll at least 41 and possibly as high as 100.
It was not clear if the poisonings were intentional or a result of spoiled food. Some reports said rat poison may have been to blame for the illnesses, which were first reported early Saturday.
On its noon news broadcast, government broadcaster China Central Television showed ambulances and military vehicles taking victims to a hospital, where many were being treated in hallways and reception areas. Children were shown lying two or three to a bed, while other victims included an elderly man and some in military fatigues.
Somber relatives stood in groups outside the Nanjing People’s Liberation Army General Hospital awaiting news of their loved ones. Police guarded entrances and checked identification cards of those entering the main patient ward.
Many of the victims were students whose boarding school provided breakfast bought from a branch of the Heshengyuan Soybean Milk Shop, said Hong Kong’s Ta Kung Pao newspaper, which is known to be close to Chinese authorities. Students went into shock after taking only a couple of bites, spitting mucus and blood and falling to the ground unconscious, it said.
People who answered phones at hospitals where victims were sent refused to say how many had died, citing a city Health Bureau order not to release any information. Bureau officials refused to comment on the case, and government officials and police would only say an investigation was underway.
Chinese authorities tightly control access to information on crime, fires, poisonings, worker protests and other such incidents. Authorities are believed to be particularly anxious about possible upheaval with the approach of a key Communist Party congress in November.
Reports said victims fell ill after eating fried dough sticks, sesame cakes and glutinous rice bought at the shop. Most of the victims were students at the nearby Zuochang Middle School and migrant construction workers. School officials refused to answer questions.
Another Hong Kong newspaper, Ming Pao, said China’s official Xinhua News Agency had briefly reported 41 dead on Saturday, but had then quickly deleted the report. It said hospital officials indicated the death toll could be as high as 80.
Ming Pao said more than 600 had been poisoned and cited analysts saying the symptoms were consistent with exposure to rat poison.
The papers said police shut down the shop and were searching it for poison. No one answered calls to a phone number for the shop printed on its awning.