GUJAR KHAN: Over 125 students from a school near Jhelum were hospitalised on Saturday after inhaling the fumes of the anti-dengue spray, police said on Saturday.

The Punjab chief minister, still fuming from a similar incident that affected at least 50 students in an Attock girls’ school, ordered the suspension of five senior district officials, including Jhelum’s district coordination officer (DCO), the EDO health, EDO education, the town municipal officer and the Dina assistant commissioner.

The unfortunate episode took place in the Government Higher Secondary School for Girls, Domeli. The school’s principal, two security guards, two drug sellers and the person who carried out the spray, were all rounded up, sources told Dawn. No FIR was registered till the filing of this report.

Five officials suspended, school staff in police custody

Sources in the Jhelum DHQ Hospital said that four more girls affected by the toxic fumes of the spray were brought to the hospital at about 9:45pm. They said it was feared that many more people had been affected by the fumes.

The sources said that the principal had received strict instructions to carry out the spray in their school. In response, the administrator is said to have purchased a mosquito-killing pesticide from a local market on her own and arranged for the spray in the classrooms on Friday evening, after school hours.

In an effort to ensure that the spray worked, the doors and windows of all classrooms were kept shut until school reopened the next day. When students arrived in classes on Saturday morning, a number of them began to feel dizzy and nearly 40 girls fainted. This number continued to rise throughout the day, but sources said that ambulances were not immediately available at the government hospital in Domeli to take the girls for treatment. Domeli is a village in Jhelum district.

Later, ambulances from Jhelum and Dina took the affected girls to the DHQ hospital Jhelum and Mangla hospitals. Some of the girls were said to have encountered serious respiratory problems and shifted to hospitals in Rawalpindi.

After the incident, Punjab Education Minister Rana Mashood, CM’s Health Adviser Khawaja Salman Rafiq, the chief secretary, health secretary and education secretary rushed to Jhelum and Domeli. They also held a video conference with the chief minister later in the day.

In a handout issued from Lahore, the chief minister was quoted as having said that samples of the spray from both the Domeli and Attock schools would be sent to laboratories for analysis and further action would be taken in the light of the results of those tests.

He set up an inquiry committee, which will consist of the Rawalpindi commissioner and a health expert, to look into the matter.

The CM suspended the DCO, the EDOs for health and education as well as the TMO, over a similar incident in a girls’ school in the Jand area of Attock district.

Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2015

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