Poisoning schoolgirls

Yes of course - it's Afghanistan:

Blood tests have confirmed that a series of mysterious mass sickenings at girls’ schools across the country over the last two years were caused by a powerful poison gas, Afghan officials said Tuesday.

The sickenings had long been officially dismissed as episodes of mass hysteria, caused by the frequency of arson and acid attacks directed at schoolgirls by the Taliban and other extremists who oppose their education.

How the gas was delivered — and even whether the poisonings were deliberate — remained a mystery, the officials emphasized. There have been no fatalities, and no one has ever claimed responsibility for the episodes. But the cases have been reported only in girls’ schools, or in mixed schools during hours set aside only for girls.

Blood samples from victims in 10 attacks over the past two years showed toxic levels of organophosphates, according to Dr. Kargar Norughli, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health, who said his ministry and the World Health Organization carried out the tests at laboratories in Turkey....

At 9:30 Saturday morning, students at the Zabihullah Esmati High School in the Kart-e-Naw area of Kabul alerted their deputy principal, Tela Mohammed Ameri, of a strong, sweet smell in one of the classrooms.

Soon the odor turned foul, and several girls began complaining of headaches and sore throats, both in that classroom and an adjacent one. Within minutes, they began fainting. Mr. Ameri ordered the school evacuated. Many of the girls fainted as they tried to flee — in the hallways, in the courtyard outside, and even half an hour later as they walked home. A few reported that they passed out at home hours later....

There was no visible sign of any poison in the classrooms.

“Even I started feeling dizzy,” he said. “It felt like somebody was choking me, or pressing in my head; my eyes were red and sore.”

In the courtyard of the school on Tuesday, students and teachers still complained of sore throats, dizziness and headaches. One 12th grader, 18-year-old Khalida Bashir Ahmed, said she was determined to return to school even though she still felt dizzy; she still had a medical tube dangling from her right wrist. As she recounted her ordeal, she fainted and fell to the ground. Teachers revived her by splashing water on her forehead and sent her home.

In all, 45 students and 4 teachers on Saturday were taken to the local hospital, the Rahman Mina Clinic, according to the clinic’s deputy director, Dr. Rahmatullah Hafizi. Only three days earlier, he said, the clinic received 74 students from another girls’ school, the Totya High School, in the same part of the city, with the same problems.

With varying degrees of severity, the victims displayed classic symptoms of organophosphate poisoning....

The gassings mostly occurred areas of the country with large Pashtun populations, where opposition to girls’ education has been particularly strong. The Kart-e-Naw part of the city where the schools in the newest cases are located is a heavily Pashtun quarter.

Attacks on schools in Afghanistan, particularly girls’ schools, have been rife in recent years, with most of them carried out by insurgents. A spokesman for the Ministry of Education, Gul Agha Ahmadi, said 60 schools had been burned down or destroyed so far this year. Cases where acid is thrown on girl students take place frequently in the south, and occasionally even in Kabul.

For an insight into Pashtun sexuality, and why women are seen as unclean, see here.

Comments

[dprosenthal]

One of the best examples of modern Taliban thought: Better for females to be DEAD than able to read and write.

[Dom]

There used to be a "Bikini vs Burqa" meme going around. Usually, the Oikophobe (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oikophobia) claims the Burqa is superior to the Bikini. The usual response is, Well, you don't have to wear a Bikini. But nobody really considered how disruptive the Burqa is to the society as a whole, not just to those who wear them.

[GMan]

For an allaged professor of journalism at Stanford University this Joel Brinkley is a tad sloppy with the facts. To describe those men as "paedophiles" is ridiculous as their behaviour, however repulsive, is opportunistic. I doubt most of them would be kiddy fucking if their culture allowed healthy sexual development. What's more, I'm confident both Christians and Muslims would be aghast at this line: 'Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful.' Yes, because Muslims are big followers of the Bible. Cough cough...