About 450 employees fell ill on Sunday after complaining of contaminated water at their workplace near the Bangladeshi capital, the second such incident to hit the same garment factory in recent days, police said. The workers, most of them women, were hospitalised when they started vomiting and reporting stomach pains after drinking water supplied by the factory in the industrial town of Ashulia, local police chief Badrul Alam told AFP.
"About 450 workers were taken to different hospitals," Alam said, adding that most have since been released. Alam said the owners shut down the plant while police sent samples of the water to a laboratory for testing.
The factory called Rose Limited was also hit by mass food poisoning on Friday night when about 200 workers were taken to hospital after eating dinner supplied by the workplace, Mustafizur Rahman, a director of the Industrial Police, told.