Seven San Francisco middle school students should be fine after they ate or otherwise came into contact with rat poison cubes that they mistook for candy, authorities said Thursday.
A girl found the poison on top of a cabinet in a classroom at Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School and "apparently, the smell appealed to her," said Lt. Mindy Talmadge, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Fire Department.
A couple of the children swallowed small bites of the poison, which was in cubes that "looked very similar to a salt chew that was turquoise in color," Talmadge told msnbc.com. The others licked it or spit out their bites, she said.
Bromadiolone is a highly effective rodenticide that works as a blood thinner, and symptoms of ingesting it usually don't appear for several days, medical references said.
None of the children, all of whom are ages 10 to 12, was believed to have eaten enough to cause serious problems, said Talmadge, but as a caution, they were all examined at a hospital.
An initial sweep of the campus found no other pieces of the poison beyond small chunks that may have been dropped by the children, she said.
