ELEVENT girl students in a junior high school in Zhenxiong County in Yunnan Province felt sick and fainted briefly after having lunch Last Friday, a local newspaper reported yesterday.
Xiao Yun, a 16-year-old student at the Guozhu Central School, passed out after lunch and her mother rushed to the school after receiving phone calls from her daughter's classmates, the Yunnan based Metropolitan Times said.
The mother, surnamed Li, said more than ten other girls also showed similar symptom of nausea and dizziness.
Xiao Yun was hospitalized at the Zhenxiong County People's Hospital at 8:30pm with symptoms of trembling, headache, listlessness and breathing difficulty, but doctors failed to find the cause.
Another parent surnamed Wang said his daughter also felt headache and fainted while doing homework in the classroom. His daughter was sent to the same hospital as Xiao Yun.
Food poisoning was suspected for the girls' illness but the school's headmaster Wu Zhen declined to comment, saying he was still at a meeting. On Saturday, Wu said all the students were in good condition.
Local health authorities tested food samples from the school canteen and ruled out food poisoning. A government official told reporters that the symptoms first appeared among a few students on November 3 and affected more students nearly two weeks later.
A sharp change in temperature could also be a factor because as the 11 sick students were all wearing thin clothes and some were having from flu.
