148 girls from Ikonge PAG Girls Secondary School in Nyamira County were on Wednesday, July 19, rushed to hospital after simultaneously suffering severe stomachaches.
Nyamira North Sub-County Education Director Claire Oyula, who arrived at the institution to assess the situation, noted that the students were taken to different facilities.
Reports indicate that the students fell ill after allegedly consuming contaminated water.
A majority of the students were taken to Ekerengo Hospital for specialised treatment.
It was not clear what caused the water contamination at the public institution with a student population exceeding 330.
Officials from the Ministry of Education were also deployed to the school to offer guidance.
Cases of water and food contamination within schools, mostly boarding, have been on the rise since the beginning of the year with the worst case experienced at Mukumu Girls in Kakamega.
On April 3, Mukumu Girls was shut down after a severe case of diarrhoea broke out at the institution and claimed four lives, three students and a teacher.
124 students were hospitalised at Kakamega Referral Hospital while the school was temporarily shut down.
New Directives
At the end of May, Education CS Ezekiel Machogu introduced new rules that all schools across the country must follow when procuring food and water for consumption.
First, all schools were required to form a safety sub-committee tasked with ensuring that the school adheres to all sanitation requirements and has systems to protect all learners in case of a disease outbreak.
The Ministry also scaled up transportation of its officers to schools for routine inspections and mandated all schools to reduce the quantity of foodstuff bought by individual institutions.
"What we are also advising the schools out of the experience we had in Mukumu Girls is that they don't have to buy maize, beans, and rice to last the entire term because the quantities they had would have lasted the entire term.
"Also the kind of preservatives being used is one other thing that brought problems. We are now checking on that. Out of that experience, we are escalating that to all our schools nationally so that our county directors, the public health people and the experts are able to check on this," he stated at time.
