news

Actually, I just realized that I can read the original Drammens Tidende article through the Amedia subscription I'm mooching, so thanks to that I can provide you with a picture of the specific container of dish detergent in question.

Though even in the Norwegian News Agency article, you can see that it says "water", not "juice", so based on that I figured that the dish detergent must've been clear and transparent. Furthermore, I was a bit of a bad translator when it came to the word kanne in the Norwegian News Agency article: This word covers a wide range of different liquid containers whose commonalities include having a handle and a mouth/spout — so I wasn't sure whether to translate this word as pitcher, jug, can, pot, or whatever, so I just used the generic catch-all "container". But evidently it was jugs in this case.

Drammens Tidende writes that an employee at the preschool took a jug to fill with tap water to pour for the kids, and ended up confusing this jug with the jug of dish detergent. Drammens Tidende also writes that the preschool claims that poison control told them to contact the parents, "who would contact healthcare professionals"; the preschool refuses to answer for "privacy reasons" why they didn't just call an ambulance themselves. The preschool says that the incident happened because their provider had redesigned/changed the labels, and that the dish detergent hadn't been checked and locked away.

The poisoning incident occurred on August 12 and the parents of the child in question were notified more or less immediately afterwards, whereas the parents of the other kids at the preschool were only told two weeks later near the end of August, which they are rightfully upset about. The poisoned child's peers have been informed about what happened, and have made drawings to support their friend.

All in all this story reminds me of an incident in Alaska in 2021, where elementary school children were served floor sealant instead of milk. I never found out what happened to the investigation into that incident — I know if nothing else that the school's investigation into its own (lack of) communication with the parents was dropped in 2023. Perhaps our friend @Alaskaball@hexbear.net might have more of a clue about what happened to Sítʼ Eetí Shaanáx̱ - Glacier Valley Elementary School in the Juneau School District.

In any case, I found it very striking in the Alaska incident how the school was "majority minority" with a high share of "economically disadvantaged" students. In the Norway incident, no information is provided whatsoever about the ethnic makeup of the children nor the wealth of their families, nor are any details provided about the poisoned child whatsoever — but I wouldn't be surprised at all if there turned out to be a racial or wealth component to this story, because there is a known history of even blatant discrimination against children "with non-Western backgrounds" in Norway's education system.

But even assuming this was "just an accident": while accidents do happen, I think this incident still shows the risks that come with handing off preschooling to private institutions, and I worry if incidents like this might become more common as Norway shifts further and further to the right. Incidents like this don't come out of nowhere — they have, as a rule, a systemic cause.