Chengdu city authorities have threatened to close schools that
fail to meet strict new hygiene standards, issued after a series of
food poisoning cases.
Chengdu Municipal Education Bureau in Sichuan Province yesterday issued an emergency
circular demanding improved efforts to ensure food safety among the
city's kindergartens, and primary and high schools.
Kindergarten, primary and high school canteens that fail to meet
hygiene standards will be closed and remain so until proper
improvements are made, according to the circular.
Thirty-eight groups of supervisors are to be assigned to
districts, cities and counties under Chengdu's administration over
the next week to ensure the new rules are observed.
There have been a string of school food poisoning cases reported
in Sichuan since last week.
The first case was reported as pupils at Dunyi Primary School,
in the town of Wangsi near Chengdu, started vomiting after lunch in
the school canteen.
As of yesterday afternoon, 66 pupils were in hospital diagnosed
with acute gastroenteritis.
There was also a food poisoning case at Tashui Junior High
School in Anxian County, which affected more than 60 students.
Finally, a total of 606 pupils and teachers fell ill after lunch at
Chongzhou City Experimental Primary School canteen.
The bacterium that caused the food poisoning outbreak here was
later identified as Shigella sonnei, a cause of
dysentery.
After this outbreak, parents complained that the local
government had been slow in informing them of the crisis, and in
dealing with the disease.
Also this month, about 1,000 of some 1,300 students at Junle
Town Central School in Pengzhou, another city under Chengdu's
administration, became ill after eating cold soybeans and soup made
of fatty meat and potatoes at the school canteen. Three of the 38
hospitalized students were diagnosed as suffering from food
poisoning that resulted from Shigella sonnei.
(China Daily September 12, 2006)