Posted by By Demola Akinyemi on
ELEVEN people comprising a family, relatives and friends have been hospitalised following the consumption of what was largely suspected to be poisonous yam flour which has claimed about 12 lives in Kwara State since the beginning of this year.
ILORIN - ELEVEN people comprising a family, relatives and friends have been hospitalised following the consumption of what was largely suspected to be poisonous yam flour which has claimed about 12 lives in Kwara State since the beginning of this year.
Vanguard reliably gathered that save for the timely administration of first aid medical treatment the 11 people who include an Islamic cleric, his wife and three children would have passed on.
Eye witness account told Vanguard that trouble started last Thursday when the clericc's wife, Mrs. Taye Abubakar, a nurse, purchased some quantity of yam flour from a seller at Oja Tuntun [New Market], a short distance from where the family lives in Agbo-Oba area of Ilorin.
The woman according to the source used part of the flour to prepare amala food which the family, the relatives who consisted of cousins of the cleric and a sister-in-law to the woman and her child, and a friend of the cleric ate with stew and ewedu soup around 4:00pm the same day.
According to Mrs. Abubakar who narrated the ugly incident to Vanguard when visited at Kidiz Medical Centre where she works and where some of the victims were hospitalised, since Thursday around 6:00pm, she said that among 11 of them who took the meal, three children, including her twins children, Taye and Kehinde Abubakar immediately started complaining of dizziness and moments later, they started vomiting.
She claimed to have treated them with an injection and thereafter asked her husband, the cleric, Mallam Sheu Abubakar, to pray for them. She said that while the children were with her husband one of the twins, Kehinde suddenly started convulsing adding that it was then she suspected that they had taken poisonous substance.
The woman said she suspected that the yam flour they ate contained poisonous substance because the hospital where she works recently treated six patients of same family who displayed similar symptoms when they ate contaminated yam flour.
She also said that she immediately administered first aid treatment on Kehinde to calm his brain from abnormal discharge while the 9-year-old was thereafter rushed to Kidiz Medical Centre at Olorunshogo area of Ilorin.
Mrs. Abubakar said no sooner than her child was admitted in the hospital when her brother-in-law, Kunle Abubakar, a 27-year-old student of Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin started convulsing while the rest of them who ate the food including herself started feeling dizzy.
She said they were all advised by the doctor to take similar first aid treatment earlier given Kehinde to reduce the effect of the poisonous meal.
The nurse said her brother in-law was also admitted in the hospital alongside her child and that they were all diagnosed of suizure disorder resulting from food poison.
She disclosed that officials of the state Ministry of Health had taken away samples of the yam flour and water with which the food was prepared, stew and ewedu soup for laboratory test.