4 students faint in school lab after ‘inhaling’ chemical in UP’s Barabanki

Four Class 6 students of a private college fell unconscious after smelling/inhaling chemicals in the chemistry lab of their school while doing practical there in Sharifabad village under Satrikh police station area in Uttar Pradesh’s Barabanki district on Friday, said an official aware of the incident.
At the time of the incident, 32 students were doing practical at Shaheed Bhagat Singh Inter College. The college staff hurriedly took all the students out of the class and admitted the unconscious ones to the community health centre where two of them were treated and sent home.
The remaining two students, whose condition was said to be serious, were referred to the district hospital, said Barabanki district inspector of schools OP Tripathi. College principal Shiv Kumar said during the practical, a few students inhaled some chemical from the test tube and started coughing.
He said the student developed difficulty in breathing due to which four of them were hospitalised. “Their condition is normal,” he claimed. “Thankfully, no major accident happened. Many types of chemicals were also kept in the lab. A major accident could have occurred had these chemicals caught fire. All the students were terrified,” said college manager Umesh Mishra.
Mishra claimed that one of the affected students was an asthma patient and he was not carrying his inhaler. Hence, the boy developed complications, he claimed. Student Harshit Singh, undergoing treatment at the district hospital, said their class teacher Gemini Kumar had taken the students to the lab for practical.
After mixing chemicals in a test tube, a pink smoke came out and after some time there was a loud explosion. The students who got caught in the smoke became unconscious. Another student Ashish Verma said, “I was doing an experiment in the lab and the amount of acid in the chemical had increased due to which the accident happened.”