‘I took a few sips, it tasted funny’: 7 people get stomachs pumped after restaurant in China mixes up fruit juice and floor detergent
- A restaurant employee who mistook floor cleaning detergent for fruit juice caused seven people to have their stomachs pumped in hospital
- One victim was a live-streamer whose video about the incident went viral before she deleted it from her account
Seven people had to have their stomachs pumped in hospital after a restaurant in eastern China mistakenly served them detergent thinking it was juice, local police said.
Douyin live-streamer Sister Wukong was eating at a restaurant in Zhejiang province with family and friends on January 16 when a waitress served their table a bottle of what they all thought was fruit juice.
Sister Wukong said in an online video after the incident that she and six others were sent to a hospital to have their stomachs pumped after they found their drinks had a strange taste and realised there had been a mistake.
They were told later by the restaurant that a waitress with bad eyesight caused the mix-up, she said in the video, which went viral but has now been deleted from her account.
All of the seven are in stable condition and will demand compensation later, a police officer from the city’s Xucun Police Station told the South China Morning Post.
“Let me show you all these people lying here. The seven of us dined together and had to have our stomachs pumped,” Sister Wukong said in her video while lying on a hospital bed.
She said her husband took the first sip and told the group it had a bitter taste before they all tasted the liquid.
“I took one sip and swallowed. My throat felt very bad immediately,” she said.
The waitress admitted afterwards that she made the mistake because she was new and had an eye condition. “She told us she doesn’t work for the restaurant normally and was just helping out for the day,” Sister Wukong said.
It’s unclear what type of floor detergent the party was served, but a search on China’s largest online shopping platform Taobao reveals a number of popular floor detergent brands that are packaged like orange juice. The packages are often in foreign languages such as English and Japanese and can easily be confused as another type of product by those who don’t speak those languages.
“This really looks like drinks. I once saw one in a supermarket in my neighbourhood, which had barely any Chinese characters on the package. I didn’t dare to buy it as I was worried the kids might drink it mistakenly,” one Douyin user commented.
