An investigation conducted by the government of Gansu province in China found that hospitals in the city of Tianshui and officials at the Gansu Center for Disease Control and Prevention falsified medical reports to conceal lead poisoning in over 200 kindergarten children.
The case of Heshi Peixin Kindergarten in Tianshui has horrified and outraged people across China. When hundreds of students became ill in March, local hospitals claimed they could find no common cause – but when parents took their children to hospitals outside the province, they quickly discovered the children had huge amounts of lead in their systems.
Investigators discovered the potentially life-threatening lead poisoning was caused by school administrators ordering their chefs to slather the food with paint so it would look better in promotional photos and videos. The chefs used pigments purchased online that were clearly labeled as toxic. Some of the sick children ingested over 2,000 times the maximum safe level of lead.
Police raided the kindergarten and arrested eight staff members soon after the story broke, but the secondary scandal is that so many officials evidently colluded to conceal the extent and seriousness of the children’s lead-induced illnesses.
Gansu investigators said on Sunday that ten provincial officials are under investigation for “oversight failures.” Investigators said both the Gansu CDC and local hospitals falsified test results for the children.
Officials under “accountability discipline investigation” included the Communist Party chief for the Gansu health commission, the director of the commission, the director of Gansu CDC, and the mayor of Tianshui.
The province-level investigation also determined that food safety inspections at the kindergarten were lax and that city officials allowed the school to operate without a license, possibly because they received gifts from an investor who bankrolled the school.
The report noted that the scandal began even earlier than previously suspected, with a case of elevated lead in one child’s bloodstream dating back to November 2024. The hospital allegedly doctored test results to conceal the extent of the lead poisoning.
The report suggested some of this skullduggery was a hasty effort to conceal incompetence by the hospital and provincial health officials who performed the early blood tests, as they mishandled blood samples and misinterpreted test results.
The investigative report suggested the poisoning might also have been the result of mind-boggling incompetence, as the director of the kindergarten routinely ate the same toxic food served to his students, with less ill effect due to his larger adult body mass.
Chinese state media on Monday announced the “first national standard for the management of school meal service,” a set of guidelines created by the China State Administration for Market Regulation with the Tianshui horror clearly in mind. The lengthy new book of “guidelines” includes high standards for food safety inspections, rules for buying ingredients for school food, and an online system for parents to watch the preparation of their children’s food in real time.
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