Suspected food poisoning in various elementary schools in the province of Forlì-Cesena, of which four in the Cesena area and at least one Forlì. Intoxication affected also a primary school in Faenza. In all cases these are schools that have joined to the Ministry of Agriculture’s project “Fruit and vegetables in schools” and in all cases it would have been cherry tomatoes that made children feel ill, arriving for a snack as part of the project.
The problem therefore does not in any way concern the meals prepared by the school canteens, but the snack provided, as part of the project, through a contract managed by the ministry by a company that is not local. They are products that usually arrive the same morning in which they are to be distributed, already packaged and delivered by companies identified by the ministry, and whose distribution to the pupils is carried out by the teachers.
Immediately after the mid-morning snack on Thursday, the children who had eaten the cherry tomatoes began to show signs of discomfort: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache. For some, the discomfort went away after a trip to the bathroom, for others the symptoms continued and in at least one case a student went to the emergency room and even the following day she still complained of stomach cramps and headaches. Situation completely similar to what happened in two other schools in Modena. Even in that case, children and teachers would have felt ill after the snack distributed as part of the “Fruit and vegetables in schools” project and after eating cherry tomatoes.
