More than a hundred people are still in hospital in Harbin,
northeast China's Heilongjiang Province?following a mass
food poisoning incident which proved fatal for a 77 year-old
patient.
The incident occurred on Monday at the Heilongjiang Provincial
Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Harbin, the provincial
capital.
According to Song Chunhua, deputy chief of criminal
investigation at the Harbin Municipal Public Security Bureau, the
hospital cook drew water from a boiler in the corridor of the
rehabilitation center early on Monday in order to prepare a
rice-based porridge.
But the water was contaminated with fluoroacetamide, a product
used to kill insects and rats.
A total of 203 in-patients and their helpers, as well as
hospital staff who ate the porridge for breakfast, fell ill. Most
of them complained of nausea and diarrhea.
Wang Enhai, deputy head of Heilongjiang Provincial Bureau of
Health and chief of local health emergency agency, said the victims
were given acetamide inoculations, a specific antidote for
fluoroacetamide.
He added that eight patients out of the 203 who had fallen ill
have now been discharged after undergoing a thorough and careful
checkup.
Police investigators are still trying to establish how the
poison came to be in the water and in the boiler. The cook who
prepared the poisonous porridge is assisting police with their
investigations.
(Xinhua News Agency April 14, 2007)