Nine children aged 5 to 6 and three adults suffered illnesses on Thursday at the association center in the commune of Fère-Champenoise, a town of 2,000 inhabitants in the Marne. At the beginning of June, around thirty children and adults in the city’s school group had already suffered “identical symptoms”, indicated the Prefecture.
Among these children are kindergarten students for the first time, while those previously affected were in primary school. Seven of them “were transported to the Châlons-en-Champagne hospital center,” added the Marne prefecture in a press release. They were all able to return home, she said in the evening. The symptoms were felt “on returning from a one-hour outing to the nearby playground,” the prefecture said.
“Identical symptoms”
They “presented identical symptoms” to those experienced between May 30 and June 4 by 30 students and three adults in the same city. They then suffered “discomfort with the main symptoms being headaches, abdominal pain and, for some, throat irritation and itching,” the prefecture listed.
The investigations carried out at the time did not make it possible to detect the cause of these discomforts, but ruled out the hypotheses of food poisoning, contamination by the water fountain and carbon monoxide poisoning. the prefecture then indicated. “The first results made it possible to assess and remove the risks associated with the presence of nearly 80 substances” in the outside air, and to ensure that the air inside primary and nursery schools was “ compliant with current standards,” the prefecture further assured.