Students hospitalized after eating teacher’s homemade yogurt in Nagoya

Science lesson leads to lots of vomiting by students and school staff.

It’s a teacher’s duty to nourish their students’ minds. Providing nutritional nourishment, though, is generally something better left to the school kitchen staff, as an incident this week in Nagoya illustrates.

On Wednesday morning, as part of a science class for children with special needs, a 72-year-old male teacher at Kanare Middle School fed six students, and five school staff members, yogurt that he had cultivated at home. Each person consumed two to four tablespoons, and about two and a half hours later two third-year students who had partaken of the fermented foodstuff began to experience stomach pains and headaches, followed by repeated vomiting, requiring them to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. Another student, a first-year pupil, threw up on their way home from school, and two of the school staff members vomited after arriving home later that same day.

As to why the teacher was handing out spoonfuls of yogurt, we have to go back to that same science class on February 22. As part of the day’s lesson, the teacher mixed milk with either store-bought yogurt or some sort of starter culture (current reports are inconsistent on that detail), then took the mixture home to ferment for a week before bringing it back for the class to eat. Thankfully, all five who experienced symptoms have recovered, and the yogurt that was in their systems appears to present no further danger. The school board is currently investigating what exactly went wrong in the yogurt-making process and caused the food poisoning.

“I wanted them to learn about lactic acid through experiments,” the teacher said following the incident, along with “I wanted to convey to them that there are bacteria that are useful in our lives.” Those are admirable goals, and while there’s a lot to be said for learning-by-doing, in hindsight it definitely seems like reading about the yogurt-making process in a textbook would have been the smarter call, especially when there are other tasty things to eat in Nagoya.

Source: Tokai TV via Yahoo! Japan News, TBS News Dig, Chunichi Shimbun
Top image: Pakutaso
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