Medical experts spoke out in public, claiming that the 194 students in a remote town of China's Yunnan Province who suffered from pain in their feet and hands in late October were not affected by food poisoning or other serious diseases but from peripheral nerve inflammation due to malnutrition.

Tuobuka middle school, located in Tuobuka Town, Dongchuan District, about 110 kilometers north of Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan province, witnessed the outbreak of a rare "disease" that caused more than one hundred students acute pain in their feet and hands at the end of October. Some could hardly walk with the pains in their feet.

According to report by Nanfang Daily, the number of affected students surged to 194 by October 29 with some being kept in custody at a local health institute while those in serious conditions were rushed to a hospital in Kunming for treatment.

All of sudden, people living there were seized by a fear as serious as that brought by SARS four years ago.

Doctors sent for investigation earlier this November noticed that most of the victims were teenage boarding students at the middle school. Focus was turned to the dining hall there and doctors suspected this might had been the source of the problem.

Doctors doubted that the working stuff might have over-washed the rice, which was assumed to be not fresh in the first place, and they took away the water when it's half-cooked for feeding pigs, which made the rice less nutritious. Besides, what the poverty-stricken students ate there everyday were simply potatoes and Chinese cabbage since they could not afford meat, with price rising along with the price hike of pork throughout the country.

Finally, the result came out that the students in Tuobuba were diagnosed with peripheral nerve inflammation that derived from long term malnutrition. Doctors distributed vitamin B1 to the students and their pains eased away three to five days after they took the pills. The pills are just 4 yuan for two bottles.

After this accident, an official from the education bureau of Dongchuan District indicated that they have required the school to leave the rice water rather than use it to feed pigs. He also expressed that they can not act like schools in big cities and provide students with high standard nutritional meals. He also pointed out that the school did serve meat but they could not sell them out since most students could not afford it.

As learned from the locals, the weekly expense per student in Tuobuka middle school is only 20 yuan, compared with 150 yuan for their peers in the big city, which is a huge gap that can not be easily ignored.