34 people detained after chemical added to chocolate kills 2-year-old

Police have detained 34 suspects across the country who are alleged to have sold poisonous weight-loss food and drugs believed to have caused the death of a 2-year-old girl in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province.

The girl, who accidentally took her mother's weight-loss chocolate, was sent to hospital to get her stomach pumped in March. However, she died from an overdose of the appetite suppressant sibutramine following respiration and heart failure.

Her relatives called police, who later detected sibutramine in the girl's body, including her liver, urine and blood.

China has banned the production, sale and use of sibutramine in the country since 2010 due to its possibility of severe damage to the cardiovascular system.

"It was originally used to treat depression, but later was widely used to lose weight after its weight-reduction effect was noticed to be more obvious than the anti-depression effect," said Geng Zhi, a cardiovascular surgeon from the Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University.

Police later found that the poisonous chocolate was purchased by the girl's mother from the internet. They detained 34 suspects from 14 provincial-level regions and seized many illegal chocolate and pills.

"Many of the suspects are young women who intentionally bought and sold the illegal weight-loss chocolate and pills on the internet," said Li Juan, a prosecutor in charge of the case, adding that all the suspects were being prosecuted in Xuzhou's Quanshan District People's Court.

Sales of diet food with illegal additives make headlines in the Chinese media from time to time. Many of them use sibutramine, which is sold as chocolate, coffee or other products that seem harmless to health.

In April, 75 suspects were detained by Shanghai police, including Guo Meimei, a former internet influencer, for producing and selling diet food with sibutramine.

In August, also in Shanghai, an online store was checked by the local market supervision bureau and it was found that its coffee contained sibutramine.

In November, another 2-year-old girl in Jinan, Shandong province, who ate her mother's weight-loss chocolate by accident, did not sleep or eat for three days. She also showed symptoms such as shaking hands and sticking out her tongue.

According to the Criminal Law in China, people who add poisonous or harmful additives to food or intentionally sell such food will be fined and sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of no more than five years.

Those who cause death or other serious consequences will be more severely punished, including life imprisonment or even death sentence, according to the law.