Health and education officials at elementary schools in a central Japanese city reported that more than 900 people have fallen ill due to a suspected outbreak of mass food poisoning.
According to CNN, at least 905 students and 41 teachers and staff at 15 elementary schools suffered food poisoning on Wednesday and Thursday in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka., a coastal city about 125 miles southwest of Tokyo.
The incident has forced the local government to cancel classes as an effort of preventing the outbreak from spreading. Students and staff members reportedly suffered from vomiting and diarrhea, all symptoms of food poisoning, said the local education board.
"Most of them developed such symptoms Wednesday night. They had eaten school lunch but any causal relation with the symptoms have yet to be confirmed," Seiko Terada, director of health and school lunch at the board, told AFP.
Health officials are currently examining the lunch eaten by the students to confirm the cause of the outbreak, but CNN reported that the outbreak could be linked to norovirus, which is a common foodborne illness.
"We have detected norovirus in five stool samples taken from some of the affected pupils," Hamamatsu city health official Toshihiko Furuta said.
Classes were scheduled to resume Friday, but there has been no reported on whether students returned to school.
The incident comes less than a month after 1,400 people in Japan fall ill after eating frozen food that was tainted with a pesticide, which sparked a recall of about six million packages.
Food company, Maruha Nichiro Holdings, purchased full-page advertisements in Japan's major newspaper apologizing and warning customers to avoid eating any of the tainted items. The tainted products include pizza, croquettes and pancakes. All items were manufactured in a Gunma Prefecture Japanese factory.
Individuals who consumed the products laced with pesticide have reportedly been experienced food poisoning symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea.
