Pretoria - A woman was arrested on Friday for feeding children a substance that caused severe vomiting and diarrhoea at a Mamelodi East crèche.
Sixteen children fell sick and were rushed to hospitals on Thursday afternoon.
The woman is said to have prepared lunch for the children at Malerato Centre for Hope, and, police said she had been arrested for assault after she gave the children an aloe extract with their meal.
“It is suspected that she gave them something to swallow, which caused excessive illness,” police spokesman Warrant Officer Mike Mbewe said.
Of the children, two had been found in a severely critical condition by Lifemed paramedics soon after they had had their midday meal, being mostly affected because they were very young.
One had been airlifted to a Joburg hospital, another rushed by ambulance to the emergency rooms of Steve Biko Hospital. The others were stabilised before being transported to other hospitals.
Meanwhile, provincial and local government had sent teams into the crèche to investigate and get to the root of the issue on Friday morning. The Department of Health immediately dispatched an outbreak response team to assess the situation when they received reports of the incident.
Health inspectors from the City of Tshwane had also descended on the crèche to examine the area where food was prepared and stored, with the aim of finding out if the problem was in the facility, in the community around it, or if it was in the children’s homes.
But at the centre of investigations by the Department of Social Development, was the legitimacy of the facility, which operates from an orphanage.
“An early childhood development team went there to establish if they had all documentation allowing them to keep children there for long hours, and if they were allowed to feed them,” spokesman Sello Mokoena said.
The crèche’s menu, capacity to prepare food, and if they complied with the numbers they could keep, were also aspects which were scrutinised, he said.
Mokoena said they also would be checking to see if the physical structure of the crèche was in order, and if they were properly registered as a crèche: “We will establish if they are compliant with the early childhood development specifications for such a facility, since they are a home too.”
The report from this investigation would be complete by the middle of next week, Mokoena said.
Four of the children had been taken to Mamelodi Hospital, two to the Dr George Mukhari, while another two were being treated at Steve Biko Academic Hospital.
Zwane said: “One of the children was airlifted to an unidentified hospital, and the department is busy tracing another five who have been admitted to other hospitals in Johannesburg.”
Pretoria News