Students destroy, try to burn down school after mass food poisoning from canteen

By Ryan Kilpatrick, March 22, 2015

Middle school students in southwest China's Guizhou Province rioted throughout their campus earlier this week after dozens of classmates were hospitalized by poor quality canteen food.

When the post-New Year holiday term started on March 8, the school moved to the new campus where the cafeteria still wasn't fully constructed. Instead, students has to queue up to collect food from a single window.

Often having to line up for longer than an hour, students joked that getting lunch was harder than getting tickets for the annual Chunyun mass migration back home.

With just 35 minutes allotted on the schedule for lunch since signing a partnership agreement with an elite school in Hengshui, Hebei, however, many students were going hungry.

If they were lucky enough to get something to get something to eat they described the dishes as strangely "sour" and even spotted maggots in some. All the same, they were too hungry to turn them down.

Beginning on the 18th, a number of students started to experience weakness, vomiting and diarrhea, and ambulances appeared on campus to take students to the Puding People's Hospital.

Rumors spread that over 100 students were in hospital, and festering anxieties exploded on the night of March 19.

The sound of breaking glass rang through the halls shortly after midnight, with students throwing trash cans and their beds down to the ground. Hand rails were ripped form the stairways and some students even tried burning the building down by setting their bedding on fire.

Costing nearly RMB500 a piece, the overpriced but paper-thin blankets often resulted in sleepless nights for the students as they shivered in their bunks, and were another item on their list of grievances.

According to local officials, most of the 44 hospitalized students have now recovered from gastroenteritis and are now back home, while some have remained in care.

[Images via iNewsweek]