Strange illness in Kano caused by food poisoning, says NAFDAC

The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) says the strange illness in Kano is caused by food poisoning.

Mojisola Adeyeye, NAFDAC director-general, confirmed this in an interview with Channels Television on Wednesday.

TheCable had reported how the outbreak of a strange infection had led to the death of two persons and hospitalisation of 183 others in the state.

As of the time of reporting, the cause of the illness was only suspected to be food poisoning.

The state ministry of health confirmed that the affected patients presented symptoms of haematuria which causes bloody urine or dark urine, fever, lethargy, and sometimes jaundice.

Adeyeye described the incident as ”very serious”, adding that investigations are still in progress.

“The Kano incident is a case of food poisoning with flavored drinks that has a chemical called dansami. It is very serious because the food poisoning resulted in diarrhea, vomiting, and hospitalisation,” she said.

“Our zonal director, Pharmacist Gimba, is on top of this and our pharmacovigilance officers are also investigating what actually happened.

“We’re going to do a lot of testing in the lab to know the nature of this chemical that probably led to the food poisoning.

The director-general, however, said she does not yet have details on the origin of the flavored drinks.

She said though the chances of recurrence are minimal, NAFDAC is yet to find out if it approved the manufacturing of the drink.

“But our pharmacovigilance is already there; so once we discover the cause, we’ll know what next to do in terms of arresting the culprit or bringing them to the office to know what is going on,” she said.

“The chances of recurrence are minimal. But we don’t even know whether the flavored drinks are smuggled. We sometimes find out that manufacturing is not approved by NAFDAC. So, we just have to find out whether this particular flavored drink was approved by NAFDAC.”