Poisoned student's case prompts security review

The Huang Yang case has raised doubts over the management of college laboratories, and as a result, many colleges and universities have ordered their laboratories to carry out safety reviews. On April 19, the school of pharmaceutical sciences at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, issued new rules on the management of toxic chemicals. The regulations ban students from working with toxic chemicals on their own and require that experiments are always conducted in the presence of an observer.

An investigation by Southern Metropolis Daily claimed that on April 24, many laboratories at the No 1 experimental building at Guangdong Pharmaceutical University's Zhongshan campus were unoccupied, but the doors were unlocked -in one, hundreds of bottles of chemicals and measuring equipment had been left unattended on tables.

In the school's No 2 experimental building, a postgraduate student was conducting an experiment alone in a lab on the third floor. She told the newspaper that postgraduate experiments are usually undertaken without the involvement of teachers.

One student left electrical equipment running while they went for lunch. A bottle of chloroform had been left on a table; its label warned that the chemical is toxic, a stimulant and has an anesthetic effect. The front and back doors of the lab were wide open, allowing easy access to all comers.