The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Chirec students taken ill

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 17, 2007
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Chirec students taken ill

Staff Reporter

School authorities do not rule out seasonal sickness common during onset of summer

HYDERABAD: Scores of Chirec Public School students were admitted to a private hospital in city with symptoms of food poisoning on Thursday.

The school, situated Kondapur, offers breakfast and lunch to the students and staff. Though the practice has been there in the school for the last 14 years, Thursday's incident raised serious concerns among parents about hygiene and quality of food served to their wards.

Even as the students were admitted to the hospital after they had vomiting and developed nausea, the school management, which conducted an internal inquiry and sent the samples of the food and water for testing, sought to assure the parents that only safe food and packaged mineral water was being served to the children. The school authorities, in their communication to the parents, however, did not rule out the possibility of children suffering from seasonal sickness common during onset of summer.

However some parents were not convinced with the explanation. "It may be true that all the children who ate lunch in the school did not develop similar symptoms. But the fact remained that large number of students took ill was reason enough to believe that hygiene standards were not up to the mark," they argued. "The school authorities did not agree that it was an act of negligence on their part," a parent said.

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