Chinese authorities held the boss of a fast food restaurant for questioning yesterday as they investigated a food poisoning outbreak that state media said killed 41 people and put hundreds more in the hospital.
Locals in Tangshan, a small industrial town near the eastern city of Nanjing, estimated more than 100 people had died after eating breakfast snacks including sesame cakes and fried dough sticks at a branch of the Heshengyuan Soy Milk chain.
The Communist Party's Central Committee and the Cabinet sent a team of police and health officials to investigate the case, state media said, highlighting concerns in Beijing about bad publicity in the sensitive run-up to a leadership change.
The official Xinhua news agency said on its Web site yesterday 400 people, many of them construction workers and school children, were poisoned and 41 had died. It quoted doctors saying the death toll was likely to rise.
But it later reverted to an earlier story, saying only that "a number of victims" had died and more than 200 were poisoned.
"Conditions of most patients are now basically stable, and investigations are going on," Xinhua said.
Newspapers yesterday were all vague about the death toll.
Locals said they saw scores of ambulances rushing several hundred people to hospital, and far more than 41 were dead.
Rumors about the poisoning were swirling around Tangshan and Nanjing, with some saying they suspected foul play.
Others said they saw victims bleeding at the mouth and ears.
There was no explanation for the change on the Xinhua Web site, but state media are often subject to strict controls on coverage of disasters and other stories deemed sensitive by the government.
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