German hospitals swamped with E.coli victims

A sign at a restaurant in Luebeck, June 4, 2011, reads: “For precaution, we don’t serve cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce”


German hospitals are struggling to cope with the flood of E.coli victims, health minister Daniel Bahr said today, as scientists remain puzzled by the deadly bug that has killed 19 and infected 1,700 people across Europe.

Hospitals in the northern port of Hamburg, epicentre of the outbreak that began three weeks ago, have been moving out patients with less serious illnesses to handle the surge of people stricken by a rare, highly toxic strain of the bacteria.

“We’re facing a tense situation with patient care,” Bahr told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper today. He said hospitals outside Hamburg could be used to make up for “insufficient capacity” in Germany’s second-largest city.

Authorities in Germany are racing to track down the source of the pathogen, which has infected people in 12 countries — all of whom had been travelling in northern Germany.

Officials believe people were made ill by eating lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers or other raw salad vegetables in Germany.

Scientists suspect the source of the contamination may have been poor hygiene at a farm, in transit, or in a shop or food outlet.



Many of those infected have developed haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), a potentially deadly complication attacking the kidneys.

Diners avoid salads

The rare strain of E.coli has the ability to stick to intestinal walls, where it pumps out toxins, sometimes causing severe bloody diarrhoea and kidney problems.

Some patients have needed intensive care, including dialysis. It has hit women more than men, and most of those who have died were elderly.

A spokesman for the Regio Clinics, the largest private hospital in the state of Schleswig-Holstein that surrounds Hamburg, said the crisis was straining resources.

“All the hospitals in the region are pushing their limits,” said the spokesman. “We can handle it but some of our patients have to be sent to other hospitals, especially those with HUS or needing dialysis.”

He added: “Operations for non-life-threatening illnesses are being rescheduled. It looks like the situation may be improving though, as we now have only 60 patients who need to be isolated, compared with 109 on Friday.”

People were steering clear of salads.

“I’m a vegetarian, so it hits me especially hard,” said taxi driver Wolfgang Roenisch. “I’ve stopped eating cucumbers, tomatoes and salad.”

But Amin Najibi, owner of a small restaurant, said there were still fearless salad-eaters: “We’re still serving salad though demand has fallen a bit. I think people are eating normally.”

Scientists are pursuing a number of theories as to where the deadly strain of E.coli originated.

Experts told Welt am Sonntag newspaper it could have spread from a biogas plant. During the biogas fermentation process new bacteria often develop.

“They cross and fuse together,” Bern Schottdorf said. “What then happens has so far not been researched.”

Yesterday a microbiologist said officials had identified a restaurant in the northern port city of Luebeck as a possible place where the bug had been passed to humans. At least 17 people infected with E.coli had eaten there.

Special Report: Inside Germany’s E.coli hunt

German Agriculture and Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner talks to the media as she arrives at an European Agriculture Ministers emergency meeting in Luxembourg June 7, 2011. European Union farm ministers will try on Tuesday to agree financial aid for fruit and vegetable producers whose sales have been hit by an E.coli outbreak that has killed 22 people in Europe.


Even if Germany finds the source of the E.coli outbreak that has infected thousands of people since early May, it may be too late for Erika.

The 66-year-old chain smokes in the grounds of a Hamburg hospital as she waits to learn if an apparently healthy salad has given her a rare and deadly disease.

“I had prepared a salad with cucumbers and tomatoes,” recalls Erika, whose husband died late last year and who asked not to be identified by her full name because the symptoms she has developed are embarrassing. “I peeled the cucumbers but I did not wash them first.”



She fell ill on May 19 with bloody diarrhoea. A few days later she heard about the outbreak on the radio and went to see a specialist. By then she was suffering from stomach cramps too.

Erika was sent to the university clinic for tests which showed she is one of 2,300 people infected by the outbreak of E.coli. Soon she will learn if she is one of more than 660 to develop haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) where the bacteria attacks the kidneys and nervous system, gives its victims fits and often forces them onto dialysis.

The deadliest outbreak of its type on record has so far killed 23 people – 22 in Germany and one in Sweden.

Striking suddenly in the middle of a hot and sunny May, the crisis has doctors struggling to explain the outbreak and public health authorities in one of Europe’s most famously organised countries stumped as to how to manage it and how to stop it happening again.

As the outbreak enters its second month, plenty of questions remain, not least of which is this: If the Germans can’t manage an outbreak, who can?

“They can’t rule out HUS yet,” Erika says, drawing deeply on yet another cigarette. “It makes you think.”

The first case in Germany’s E.coli outbreak was reported on May 1. Soon an average of nine cases a day were being reported, rising to 122 cases on May 23 alone.

TEN TEAMS DEPLOYED

At first, German officials blamed cucumbers – specifically, Spanish cucumbers. Within days, though, investigators had ruled out the vegetable and started looking closer to home for the cause.

Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to explain Germany’s actions to an irate Spanish prime minister and Spanish farmers later said they might sue for damages.

Germany’s main centre for disease control, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), deployed 10 teams to outbreak hotspots such as restaurants and canteens and to ask patients exactly what they ate for each course.

To double check the data, customers of these establishments who did not fall ill have been interviewed too. Officials have also sifted through the contents of rubbish bins and fridges and sent some of their contents for analysis.

Specialists working around the clock at RKI headquarters in Berlin cross-check the data looking for what the institute’s president, Reinhard Burger, called a “common denominator”. So far that’s pointed the finger of blame at raw vegetables.

After a few days the search took scientists to the Kartoffelkeller (Potato Cellar) restaurant in Luebeck, north east of Hamburg. The former medieval hospital offers traditional fare based on meat and potatoes.

On May 13 it had served dinner to a large group of female tax officials. Then 17 people who had eaten there had fallen sick – and one of the tax officers had died.

Owner Joachim Berger said health inspectors turned the place upside down without finding anything and when Reuters visited at lunchtime on June 4, the Kartoffelkeller was open for business and full.

None of his staff had become ill, Berger said. “Everything has been re-disinfected and inspected, but it’s clear nobody here is sick, and we all eat the food ourselves.”

But public health officials believed they were on the right track. On June 5, Lower Saxony state agriculture minister Gert Lindemann said a “really hot lead” pointed to sprout varieties (alfalfa, mung bean, radish and arugula) from a supplier that sold the Kartoffelkeller its vegetables.

Johanna Tramma at the Fruchthof, a family firm in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, said her sprouts had come from a farm in Lower Saxony which also supplied Hamburg’s wholesale market.

BEAN SPROUT THEORY

Perhaps the E.coli detectives should have focused in on sprouts more quickly. An outbreak in Japan in 1996, which killed 11 people, was traced back to a similar source, and a US outbreak in 1997 came from alfalfa sprouts.

Officials rushed to the Gaertnerhof farm in the town of Bienenbuettel in Lower Saxony, but the order to shut it down came almost too late.

It was sealed off at 5.10pm on Sunday – 20 minutes after a truckload of sprouts left for Hamburg for sale. It was recalled and returned to the farm while health officials told people to avoid bean sprouts as well as the other raw salad vegetables already on the danger list.

The farm’s owner Klaus Verbeck told a local paper – before retreating behind a fence patrolled by security guards – that the Gaertnerhof had been growing organic sprouts for 25 years and was given a clean bill of health for E.coli as recently as the second half of May.

Neighbour Sibylle Lange, 45, described the owners as “very serious, hardworking people who were very early producers of organic products”.

In many ways the bean sprout theory sounds reassuringly likely. Scientists say the steamy temperatures at which sprouts are cultivated are an ideal incubation ground for any microbe.

But even the sprouts may not be the culprits. Evidence so far is circumstantial and the first tests on suspect sprouts from Lower Saxony have been inconclusive, said the regional agriculture ministry.

The exact source may never be pinned down.

“We can’t rule out that the source of the outbreak cannot be retraced anymore. That’s not unusual in these circumstances,” said Burger at the RKI, adding that the original source of the infection may no longer exist.

“It’s something different every day,” complained Uwe Ruge, accompanying an E.coli patient at the Regio clinic in Pinneberg, a Hamburg suburb.

“First it was the Spanish cucumbers. Now it’s this, then it’s that and suddenly it’s bean sprouts. I have no clue what it’ll be tomorrow. I can’t just avoid all food.”

TOXINS AND ANTIBIOTICS

Of the 660 or so people to have developed HUS, more than 100 have been diagnosed at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in the northern port city of Hamburg.

Confirmed HUS cases are treated in an intensive care unit kept closed to the media. At the entry to the unit and to the separate blood-testing unit for outpatients are antiseptic handwash dispensers and signs telling visitors to use them.

The patient profile is confusing: more women than men have developed the worst symptoms, and the women tend to be young – in the 25-35 age bracket. Most of them also tend to be slim. That may be because young women tend to eat more raw vegetables and salad as a “healthy” option, health experts say.

The German E.coli strain was first sequenced by a laboratory at the Beijing Genomics Institute, the world’s largest DNA sequencing centre. On June 3 it identified the E.coli as a new and “highly infectious and toxic” strain.

There is no a clear indication yet if the rate of infection has peaked. “We hope that it fades and in the past few days, when we look at the numbers, we see it’s getting better,” Joerg Debatin, the medical director and CEO at Hamburg-Eppendorf, said. “But we honestly said the same thing a week ago.”

E.coli turns into HUS when bacterial or “Shiga” toxins enter the bloodstream, according to kidney specialist Professor Rolf Stahl, head of nephrology at the Hamburg university clinic. That can lead to potential kidney and neurological damage and even trigger epilepsy.

Like other E.coli patients, Erika was given medicine to repair her intestinal flora and told to disinfect her household and drink plenty of liquids. But she was not given antibiotics as doctors say this strain of the bug can be resistant and there is growing concern among scientists about the spread of resistance to antibiotics among many common bacteria.

NOT SO HEALTHY

Even when it is contained, the outbreak will have done lasting damage to at least some conceptions about ‘healthy’ organic food in a part of the world where enthusiasm for natural produce is high.

“Genfood? Nein, Danke!” reads a bumper sticker with a smiley tomato logo on a truck at the Gaertnerhof farm in Bienenbuettel.

Adapting the smiley sun-logo of the German anti-nuclear lobby to oppose genetically modified food – “Genfood” – proponents of natural foods have seen the organic market in Germany grow to €5.8 billion (RM25.55 billion) by 2009 (the latest figures available from the national organic trade body). Just under a fifth of that comes from German farms.

Yet some studies suggest organic food is risky, especially when eaten raw, because farmers shun chemicals and rely on fertilisers such as manure or slurry. The Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli behind this outbreak are known to lurk in cattle guts.

The fact that health food and organic produce has been the focus of suspicion from the outset underlines the vulnerability of the food chain to accidents of biology, even in the one of the world’s wealthiest nations. Germany already had a food scare earlier this year over dioxins in eggs and poultry.

Among the anxious patients wearing post blood-test bandaids waiting for their results at the Hamburg clinic, Erika said she had planned to go on holiday in Majorca this month with her bowling gang, to help her get over the death of her husband. She has cancelled the trip for fear of making her friends sick.

“All I can do is wait,” she said tearfully. “The germs are inside me.”

Female Chinese students resort to eating roundworm eggs to ensure they look thin for job interviews

Bad diet: Chinese students have been swallowing roundworm eggs which hatch in the stomach. It can cause severe health problems

Female students in China have been eating roundworm eggs to lose weight for job interviews - because employment is so hard to come by.

They hatch in the stomach, allowing those who take them to shed pounds without exercising or dieting in the Xiamen, China.

But swallowing the worms is extremely dangerous - and definitely not to be recommended for those wanting to shed the pounds in the New Year.

With jobs shortages across the country, women in China are under pressure to appear thin if they are to have any chance of landing a role.

Employment stands at 22 per cent - and the size of the labour pool has grown by 112 million people over the last decade to more than one billion people.

Other students are staring at pictures for hours on end to suppress their appetite so they can shed excess weight.



A student called Xiaomei said that women are using a 'special soap' that helps them with their diets. Some are having up to 10 showers each day.

The treatments have no scientific basis and are likely to damage health.

In the 1990s Chinese women would take special teas and pills to lose weight. Acupuncture also emerged as a popular choice.

But many students struggle to find work as the world's most populous nation faces big unemployment problems with only 780 million labourers in jobs.

However, the work problem is largely confined to rural areas. Jobs in cities are being created quickly as China undergoes a rapid urbanisation.

'China is facing huge employment pressures at present and for the foreseeable future,' Yi Chengji, spokesman for the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said.

'As China's urbanisation quickens, employment pressures from the many surplus rural labourers are getting bigger and bigger.

'Currently there are about 100 million surplus rural workers that need to be transferred (to urban jobs).'

The country's urban population will rise to over 700 million people by 2015, outstripping the rural population for the first time.

According to an employment paper, there were 9.21 million registered urban jobless in China at the end of 2009, resulting in just a 4.3 per cent urban unemployment rate.

CPR switch: Chest presses first, then give breaths

New guidelines out Monday switch up the steps for CPR, telling rescuers to start with hard, fast chest presses before giving mouth-to-mouth.

The change puts "the simplest step first" for traditional CPR, said Dr. Michael Sayre, co-author of the guidelines issued by the American Heart Association.

In recent years, CPR guidance has been revised to put more emphasis on chest pushes for sudden cardiac arrest. In 2008, the heart group said untrained bystanders or those unwilling to do rescue breaths could do hands-only CPR until paramedics arrive or a defibrillator is used to restore a normal heart beat.

Now, the group says everyone from professionals to bystanders who use standard CPR should begin with chest compressions instead of opening the victim's airway and breathing into their mouth first.

The change ditches the old ABC training - airway-breathing-compressions. That called for rescuers to give two breaths first, then alternate with 30 presses.

Sayre said that approach took time and delayed chest presses, which keep the blood circulating.

"When the rescuer pushes hard and fast on the victim's chest, they're really acting like an artificial heart. That blood carries oxygen that helps keep the organs alive till help arrives," said Sayre, an emergency doctor at Ohio State University Medical Center.

"Put one hand on top of the other and push really hard," he said.

Sudden cardiac arrest - when the heart suddenly stops beating - can occur after a heart attack or as a result of electrocution or near-drowning. The person collapses, stops breathing normally and is unresponsive. Survival rates from cardiac arrest outside the hospital vary across the country - from 3 percent to 15 percent, according to Sayre.

Under the revised guidelines, rescuers using traditional CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, should start chest compressions immediately - 30 chest presses, then two breaths. The change applies to adults and children, but not newborns.

One CPR researcher, though, expressed disappointment with the new guidelines. Dr. Gordon Ewy of the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center thinks everyone should be doing hands-only CPR for sudden cardiac arrest, and skipping mouth-to-mouth. He said the guidelines could note the cases where breaths should still be given, like near-drownings and drug overdoses, when breathing problems likely led to the cardiac arrest.

Ewy is one of the authors of a recently published U.S. study that showed more people survived cardiac arrest when a bystander gave them hands-only CPR, compared to CPR with breaths.


The guidelines issued Monday also say that rescuers should be pushing deeper, at least 2 inches in adults. Rescuers should pump the chest of the victim at a rate of at least 100 compressions a minute - some say a good guide is the beat of the old disco song "Stayin' Alive."

Dr. Ahamed Idris, of the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, said people are sometimes afraid that they'll hurt the patient. Others have a hard time judging how hard they are pressing, he said.

"We want to make sure people understand they're not going to hurt the person they're doing CPR on by pressing as hard as they can," he said.

Idris, who directs the Dallas-Fort Worth Center for Resuscitation Research, said that for the last two years, they've been advising local paramedics to start with chest compressions and keep them up with minimal interruptions. That, along with intensive training, has helped improve survival rates, he said.

He said they found paramedics hadn't been starting compressions until the patient was in the ambulance and lost time getting airway equipment together.

"The best chance was to start chest compressions in the house, immediately," he said.

Las Vegas hotel guests left with severe burns from 'death ray' caused by building's design

Guests at a new hotel in Las Vegas have complained of receiving severe burns from a 'death ray' of sunlight caused by the unique design of the building.

Due to the concave shape of the Vdara hotel, the strong Nevada sun reflects off its all-glass front and directly onto sections of the swimming pool area below.

The result has left some guests with burns from the powerful rays and even plastic bags have been recorded as melting in the heat.
Chicago attorney Bill Pintas felt the power of the dangerous ray first hand last week.


'It felt like I had a chemical burn. I couldn't imagine why my head was burning,' he said.

'Within 30 seconds, the back of my legs were burning. My first though was, 'Jesus, they destroyed the ozone layer!'

Death ray: Guests at the Vdara hotel in Las Vegas have complained of receiving severe burns from the intense spot of sunlight reflected off the building

Gordon Absher, a spokesman for MGM Resorts, which owns the Vdara hotel, said they was aware of the issue and designers were working with resort staff to come up with a solution.

In fact it is claimed that the designers foresaw the issue with the reflecting sun but thought they had solved it by installing a high-tech film on the south-facing panes of glass.

However, Mr Absher, conceded it had not been enough and some of the guests had suffered as a result.

The Las Vegas Review Journal quotes one hotel employee as saying the building's design causes the sunshine to be diverted 'like a magnifying glass that shines down' over a space of about 10 by 15 feet as the poolside.

And as the Earth rotates, the spot moves across the pool area. The 'death ray' can increase temperatures by around 20 degrees.

While the designers work on fixing the problem, the hotel is looking at getting some larger, and crucially, thicker umbrellas to provide better shade for guests.

No fun: Some of those trying to sunbathe at the swimming pool had to run for cover to escape the intense heat

Rockers blasted over Indonesia tobacco deal

Australian, British and US rock bands including The Smashing Pumpkins and Stereophonics have been urged to withdraw from a music festival in Indonesia because of its tobacco sponsorship.

Anti-tobacco activists and health experts from Australia, the United States and Wales have expressed their concern that the bands' actions will encourage youths to smoke in a country with high and rising addiction rates.

The country of some 240 million people is one of the last lightly-regulated major tobacco markets in the world and is paying the price in terms of growing rates of addiction, especially among women and children.



Cigarette consumption in Indonesia soared 47 percent in the 1990s, according to the World Health Organisation











Its reputation as the wild west of tobacco control was graphically illustrated earlier this year with the release of a video on the Internet of a two-year-old Javanese boy with a 40-cigarette-a-day habit.

The Washington-based Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids said it had written to US bands The Smashing Pumpkins, MUTEMATH and Dashboard Confessional asking them to cancel their appearances at the Java Rockin'Land festival next month.

"As long as this event is sponsored by a tobacco company, any band that participates should know that it is helping market cigarettes to children," Campaign president Matthew L. Myers said.

"If these bands reject tobacco sponsorship, they can send a powerful message that they care about the health of the world?s children and will not allow their name and talent to be used to market deadly tobacco products."

In Australia, health experts have accused local bands The Vines and Wolfmother of ignoring the connection between tobacco marketing and smoking-related deaths.

"Tobacco industry marketing is a key factor in what is killing people from tobacco-caused disease -- about six million a year in fact," Simon Chapman and Becky Freeman of the University of Sydney's School of Public Health wrote in an article on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's website.

Indonesia has "virtually no tobacco control policies", making it a "tobacco industry paradise where publicity for music festivals like the one Wolfmother and The Vines will participate in wallpaper the country's media," they said.

In Britain, anti-smoking group Ash Wales has similarly condemned Welsh band Stereophonics for agreeing to play at the October 8 to 10 festival in Jakarta.

"We urge the Stereophonics to demand the withdrawal of tobacco sponsorship and any associated branding from the festival or alternatively to pull out," Ash Wales chief executive Tanya Buchanan told Wales Online website Tuesday.

"If the Stereophonics go ahead with a tobacco-sponsored concert they are, by choice, being spokespeople for the tobacco industry and helping them to market to children."

In all, 14 foreign bands are scheduled to play at the festival, along with a host of local acts. Advertising for the event includes cigarette branding and tickets are being sold at a discount to students.

The festival, billed as the biggest in Southeast Asia, is being sponsored by Gudang Garam, a major Indonesian producer of clove cigarettes.

The company regularly sponsor music events targeted at young people, saying it wants to promote Indonesian bands and associate its product with rock'n'roll values.

Wolfmother has responded to the criticism by issuing a statement on its website saying it does not "support or condemn the sponsors" and will play the gig for the fans who have "parted with their very own cold hard cash".

In the past two years, US artists Alicia Keys and Kelly Clarkson refused to play in Indonesia until their promoters dropped tobacco sponsorships.

But several other Western musicians -- most recently former Guns'n'Roses guitarist Slash -- have played with the backing of the tobacco industry.

Indonesia earns billions of dollars a year in tax revenues from tobacco companies, which employ millions of people across the country.

Cigarette consumption in the Southeast Asian archipelago soared 47 percent in the 1990s, according to the World Health Organisation.


The Smashing Pumpkins have been urged to withdraw from a music festival in Indonesia because of its tobacco sponsorship



Indonesia is one of the last lightly-regulated major tobacco markets in the world

Obesity surgery ‘could save UK millions’

Providing surgical treatment for people who are morbidly obese could save British taxpayer-funded health services and the wider economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year, leading surgeons said today.

In an economic impact assessment of obesity surgery, the Royal College of Surgeons and the National Obesity Forum said the financial toll of unemployment, welfare payments, hospital costs and prescriptions caused by obesity could be cut drastically if more patients had weight-loss surgery.

A man walks past the New York Stock Exchange after trading hours in New York




The report was written by an independent consultancy called the Office of Health Economics and funded by the health firms Allergan and Covidien, both of whom make medical equipment used in weight-loss, or so-called bariatric, surgery.

Bariatric surgery is performed on people who are dangerously obese, as a way of trying to help them lose weight. The idea is to reduce the size of the stomach, either with a gastric band or a gastric bypass that re-routes the small intestines to a small stomach pouch, or by removing a portion of the stomach.

Critics of weight-loss surgery say its long-term risks are largely unknown, particularly in children, and argue it should be a last resort for morbidly obese people who have failed to lose weight by changing their diet and lifestyle.

The British report said that if five percent of eligible UK patients were given weight-loss surgery on the taxpayer-funded National Health Service (NHS), the gain to the economy within three years would be 382 million pounds. If 25 percent got surgery, the gain in three years would be 1.3 billion pounds.

On top of that, it said, the government could also expect to save between 35 million and 150 million pounds in welfare payments as people were able to return to work.

Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which advises the government on the cost-effectiveness of drugs and medical treatments, recommends that patients with a body mass index (BMI) of 40 or more, or those with a BMI of 35 or more and other serious illnesses, should be assessed for weight-loss surgery.

BMI is equal to weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. A person 5 feet 5 inches tall (165 cm) with a BMI of 40 would weigh more than 240 pounds (109 kg).

Today’s report said that around a million people in England have a BMI that meets NICE criteria and around a quarter of those are both fit for and willing to have surgery — yet only 3,600 weight-loss operations were carried out within the NHS in the year 2009/10.

“These figures are simply staggering,” John Black, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, said in a statement with the report.

“The NHS can not afford to ignore the mounting evidence that shows that bariatric surgery, for those patients where all other treatments have failed, is not only proven to be successful but also hugely cost-effective.”

A study in the British Medical Journal last month found that use of weight-loss surgery has increased 10-fold in hospitals in England since 2000 and that those who have gastric bands fitted can reduce their risk of early death and cut health service costs.

Were Afghan schoolgirls who collapsed in classroom the victims of Taliban nerve gas attack?

Blood samples taken from Afghan schoolgirls who collapsed in an apparent mass poisoning showed traces of toxic chemicals found in nerve gas, the Health Ministry said today.

Suspicion has fallen on the Taliban, the hard-line Islamist militia that opposes education for women and prohibited girls from going to school before it was ousted in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

Poisonous levels of organophosphates were found in samples taken from girls who became sick in incidents over the last two years, ministry spokesman Dr Ghulam Sakhi Kargar said.

Poisoned: Suspicion has fallen on the Taliban after traces of toxic chemicals found in nerve gas was found in the schoolgirls' blood

Samples from more recent cases, over the weekend, have been sent to Turkey for analysis and no results have been issued.

Last month, 48 pupils and teachers at Kabul's Zabihullah Esmati High School and 60 students and teachers at the Totia Girls School were hospitalised after fainting or complaining of breathing problems, dizziness and nausea.

The youngsters said they began feeling unwell after being exposed to an unknown gas spreading through classrooms.

Most were released within hours and it remains unclear how the gas spread.

Organophosphates, which are also present in herbicides and pesticides, are the active ingredients of deadly nerve gases such as sarin and VX and even low-level exposure can damage the nervous system.

Signs of organophosphate poisoning include headache, tiredness, upset stomach and breathing trouble, all similar to the symptoms shown by the students and teachers at the Kabul schools.

Targeted? Two Afghan schoolgirls receive treatment for suspected poisoning at a Kabul hospital

Moscow bans night-time vodka sales in health drive

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Moscow banned night-time sales of vodka and other spirits today, part of a nationwide drive to curb crime and disease linked with Russia’s national drink.

The ban is among a series of tough measures to reduce alcohol abuse ordered last year by President Dmitry Medvedev as part of a fight to slow Russia’s persistent population decline. He called alcoholism a “national disaster” that undermines public health and hampers the economy.

A ban on retail sales of drinks with alcohol content of more than 15 per cent between 10 pm and 10 am came into force on Wednesday, a spokeswoman for Moscow City Hall’s retail department said. Bars and restaurants are not affected.

The ban, which brings Moscow into line with several other Russian regions, is aimed at curbing alcohol abuse, youth drinking and crime, the spokeswoman said.

In a drive to cut alcohol consumption and reduce the number of alcohol-related deaths, the federal authorities have tripled the excise duty on beer and introduced minimum prices for vodka.

The average Russian drinks 18 litres of pure alcohol per year, and a campaign against alcohol said earlier this year that 3,000 Russians a year die from alcohol poisoning and more than 75,000 from alcohol-related diseases.

In 1985 the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, declared war on the age-old Russian vice, ordering dramatic cuts in the production of wines and spirits and introducing strict controls on public consumption of alcohol.

The campaign caused a surge in the illegal production of low-quality home-brewed booze and the curbs dealt a blow to Gorbachev’s popularity.

Wednesday’s ban could increase sales of home-made “moonshine” and create an “alcoholic underground,” the head of the upper house of parliament, Sergei Mironov, said on his web site mironov.ru.

An earlier ban on night-time alcohol sales in Moscow was severely undermined by a loophole that allowed 800 stores to sell alcohol round the clock.

City Hall said there would be no exceptions this time and any outlet defying the ban can lose its licence