February 2005

Somehow poison got into the food at a snack shop in Nanjing, China, on September 14, 2002, and more than four hundred people fell ill. After forty-one of them died, the official Xinhua News Agency posted a notice warning of contaminated food in Nanjing, but this was quickly withdrawn and the government imposed a black-out on all such stories. Word of the poisoning spread by people telephoning overseas, however, and after thirty-six hours, publication of the news abroad forced an end to the domestic ban. By then about one hundred people had died.