Food Poisoning, Fatal - China (Nanjing)
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Food Poisoning, Fatal - China (Nanjing)
Date:
Wed, 18 Sep 2002 15:29:48 -0400
From:
Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide
Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
FOOD POISONING, FATAL - CHINA (NANJING) (02)
A ProMED-mail post
ProMED-mail, a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
Source: AFX News - Asia 17 Sep 2002 09:03 EST [edited]
A jealous businessman has been arrested and confessed to a mass food poisoning in China which left at least 38 people dead and hundreds ill, state media reported.
Chen Zhengping, who owned a snack shop in Tangshan, was arrested shortly after the poisoning outbreak Saturday in Tangshan Township in eastern China's Nanjing city state television's evening news reported.
"Because of business competition, he developed hatred (for his competitor) and used a rat poison 'Dushuqiang' banned by the government to poison and commit the crime," said the Xinhua news agency's website.
Several hundred others were rushed to approximately 10 hospitals after eating the rat poison-laced breakfast food from a soybean milk snack shop in Tangshan.
******
Date: 16 Sep 2002
Source: AP Online 16 Sep 2002 14:42 EDT [edited]
Hundreds of people fell ill after eating food laced with rat poison at a snack shop selling fried dough, sesame cakes, and rice in the Chinese city of Nanjing, and police opened a criminal investigation into the poisonings.
Authorities refused to release a death toll, but state media said more than 200 people were sickened and suggested dozens, including many children, might have died.
China has reported numerous cases of food poisoning in which restaurants tried to save money by using toxic industrial salts instead of table salt or cooks mistook rat poison or other chemicals for food ingredients. In July 2002, a noodle shop owner in southern China was arrested on charges that he poisoned customers at a rival business by putting rat poison in its soup.
The state-controlled media provided only scant accounts of the investigation into Saturday's poisonings. Reporters visiting Tangshan county saw investigators in white gloves searching a food-processing factory that supplied the shop and examining the ground outside. The Heshengyuan Soybean Milk Shop where the poisoned food was bought was closed, and its telephone went unanswered.
Police were questioning the manager of a company that supplied food to the shop, the state newspaper China Daily reported.
"Now we are clear it is a criminal case. The police will certainly question all related people for investigation," said a spokeswoman for the Nanjing city government, who would give only her surname, Wu. She declined to confirm details in the newspaper's account of the investigation. The spokeswoman said Hong Kong newspaper reports that 41 people were killed were wrong, but she refused to release a death toll.
Newspapers and an official reached by telephone at the Jiangsu Province Epidemic Prevention Station said examination of samples sent from hospitals showed victims had eaten rat poison.
China's Cabinet and Communist Party headquarters in Beijing have sent investigators to Nanjing and ordered "strenuous efforts" to uncover the cause, according to state newspapers.
Victims became sick after eating fried dough sticks, sesame cakes, and glutinous rice for breakfast. Many were students at the nearby Zuochang Middle School and migrant construction workers, according to state media.
Students and teachers at the military-run Nanjing Artillery Institute also were sickened, according to teachers contacted by telephone at the Zuochang school. Many of those poisoned were boarding students whose school provided breakfast bought from the shop, the Ta Kung Pao newspaper of Hong Kong reported.
Those papers and the China Daily, citing unidentified sources, said dozens of people might have been killed.
Military vehicles joined ambulances in rushing the sick to hospitals across Nanjing, where many had to be treated in hallways and entranceways due to the overwhelming number of victims.
The Zuochang School was closed and empty, with police posted outside its gates.
[Byline: Christopher Bodeen]
******
Date: 15 Sep 2002
From:ProMED-mail <promed@promedmail.org>
Source: CNN online [edited]
<http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/09/15/china.poisoning/index.html>
Rat poison is the suspected cause of an outbreak of food poisoning in China, in which dozens of people are believed to have died.
"Initial investigations indicate there was rat poison in the food that was served to the victims," the China Daily quoted Zhou Qiang, a publicity official with the Jiangsu provincial government, as saying. He said the poison could have been deliberately put into the food by someone, but public security authorities were still looking into the case that left hundreds of patrons of a small Nanjing store ill.
All of those affected fell sick on or shortly after Saturday morning. The victims were mostly students from 4 schools and transient workers from a construction site in Tangshan, a small town to the east of Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province.
The China Daily said 500 medical personnel have been mobilized to deal with the case.
The victims fell ill after eating the food from Heshenyuan Soybean Milk Shop, a designated supplier of breakfast to schools for years. The catering service has been shut down and its owner has been taken into custody for questioning. According to reports, the source of the outbreak is believed to be a branch of the Heshengyuan Soy Milk restaurant in the Tangshan district of Nanjing. The restaurant has since been closed.
Central authorities in Beijing have ordered "all efforts be made to save the victims" the state-run Xinhua news agency reported. It added that the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Public Security have both dispatched teams to the city to help medical staff and investigate the outbreak.
Several of the victims were reported to have collapsed, some coughing up blood, just minutes after eating at the restaurant.
Reports in China's state-controlled media on the exact numbers of
casualties have been mixed and confused. On Saturday the official
Xinhua news agency reported that 41 people had died and up to 400 had been
made ill by the poisoning. However, that report was quickly
deleted and replaced by an earlier story saying only that "a number of
victims" had died and more than 200 were poisoned. The Web site of the
state-run People's Daily newspaper followed a similar line saying "several
people" had died, but specifying no actual number.
Some local eyewitnesses, however, told reporters they believe dozens of people may have died, with scores of ambulances seen ferrying victims to hospitals across the city. One shop owner was quoted by Reuter’s news agency as recalling how he saw one elderly man collapse after eating breakfast at the restaurant Saturday. "It happened right there in front of my store," Peng Yongqing was quoted as saying. "One minute he was sitting there eating and the next he stood up and keeled over. We all thought he was choking, we had no idea what was wrong." Penh said he had heard that the man had died on the way to hospital.
Previous mass food poisoning outbreaks in China have been blamed on a variety of causes including use of cheaper industrial salts rather than proper culinary salt. Last year police arrested 2 owners of a noodle factory on charges of lacing their product with rat poison, causing at least 89 consumers to be hospitalized. Last September Nanjing was hit by another food scandal when state television broadcaster CCTV accused a local bakery of recycling old fillings for moon cakes -- a popular festival delicacy -- and wrapping them in fresh crusts.
- --
[In this episode as well as a prior episode in 2001, dushuqiang, "super rat poison" has been identified as the agent used. Dushuqiang is a farm chemical that has been banned, but is available on the illegal market in rural areas according to some of the newswire reports. We have been unable to identify the composition of dushuqiang, so if there are any subscribers with information on this we would appreciate receiving it.
In the absence of the composition of the specific toxin involved, some brief musings on the general subject of rat poison. Rat poison is a generic term for the various chemicals that have been used as rodenticides. While many people assume that rat poison is primarily warfarin (a drug that is used as an anticoagulant, to prolong bleeding times in patients with clotting disorders), the list of toxic chemicals that are used in the variety of products falling under the category of rat poison is rather lengthy.
Some of the more notable compounds used that, if ingested by humans, result in a rapid onset of symptoms and death include: Sodium monofluoroacetate (SMFA) (2-20 hours), Strychnine (10-20 mins), Elemental Phosphorus (1-2 hours), arsenic (1 hour), Red squill (?30 mins-6 hours). (From: Goldfrank et.al., Goldfrank's Toxicologic Emergencies, Third Edition, 1986). Hydrogen cyanide is also used in rat poison.
As mentioned in the various newswires we have collated for posting on this episode, this is not the first time there has been an intentional food poisoning in China using a rodenticide product. Most prior events were similar to this in terms of being personal rivalries or disputes at a very local level. Unfortunately none of the prior episodes have been published in peer review journals accessible via PubMed, though newswire reports are obtainable through use of various web-based search engines. None of the newswires on this current or on prior intentional rodenticide food poisonings have identified the specific chemical toxin used. From the limited descriptions provided in this current event, it is possible that hydrogen cyanide or arsenic was the chemical involved. Ingestion of either chemical can lead to dyspnea, paralysis, convulsions, and respiratory arrest. Death may occur within minutes. Lesser concentrations can cause headache, vertigo, nausea, and vomiting. Gastrointestinal bleeding has been associated with toxic ingestion of both hydrogen cyanide and arsenic. Agitation is more common with hydrogen cyanide intoxication. A short description comparing acute cyanide poisoning with acute arsenic poisoning taken from Pre-Hospital Disaster Medicine journal is accessible on the University of Wisconsin website: Differentiate Cyanide from Arsenic Poisoning by Alan H. Hall MD. <http://pdm.medicine.wisc.edu/hall.htm>
Strychnine cannot be ruled out as well, as a neurotoxin, if one speculates that the "coughing up blood" was from trauma following a seizure, rather than from gastrointestinal bleeding.
Unless there is more information on the actual chemical composition of dushuqiang, this thread is now closed. - Mod.MPP]
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