Dozens of first-graders suffer serious burns and eye damage after exposure to UV light for nine hours
- A teacher at a primary school in Tianjin was said to have accidentally left a UV disinfection lamp on all day
- Symptoms in the children taken to hospital included eye pain, bleeding, vomiting and burns to faces and necks
More than 40 first-graders at a school in the city of Tianjin, near Beijing, suffered serious burns and damage to their eyes, face and neck areas after they were exposed to ultraviolet light for nine hours, the news site Thepaper.cn reported on Thursday.
Tianjin authorities said the city’s education, hygiene and police departments had begun a joint investigation into the incident and were in talks with the parents. All affected children were sent to hospital for treatment.
The incident occurred at Dagang English Experimental Primary School on Monday, when a teacher forgot to switch off a UV disinfection lamp in the classroom. The light was on from early in the morning until another teacher discovered it had been left on by mistake at around 4.45pm.
News of the incident first broke on social media, with commenters claiming that four parents discovered that nine children in the class had suffered UV burns at 5pm that day. They then were said to have taken the children to see the school principal, who told them to seek hospital treatment.
Accounts claimed that children who were exposed to the damaging rays experienced symptoms including severe vomiting, intense eye pain and bleeding, as well as burns on their face and neck areas.
“When my child returned home, their eyelids and eyeballs were already very red,” one parent of an affected child told Pear Video.