Over 100 bags of fake rice seized in Nigeria

Nigerian authorities have seized 2.5 metric tons of reportedly fake rice during the holiday season.

Mamudu Haruna, comptroller of the Federal Operations Unit, called it "plastic" rice at a press briefing in Lagos Thursday. "We have done the preliminary analysis on the plastic rice. After boiling, it was sticky and only God knows what would have happened if people consumed it.

One customer who avoided a potential mishap was Kikelomo Adediti. She said she bought 10 cups
of the product (about 2 kg) from a small retailer in the Ikeja area of Lagos, in November.

"It looked perfectly normal and cost less [than regular rice] so I thought I got a great deal. Normally it would take about 20 minutes [to cook] but after 30 minutes it was still hard. I added more water and the aroma was chemical in nature so I decided to discard it thinking it had expired," she told CNN

Dr. Victoria Feyikemi of Babcock University Hospital Ogun state, Nigeria, said the medical consequences of consuming such products can be severe because the fake rice has synthetic resin that is harmful to the body.

"When you eat three bowls of this rice, you are basically ingesting one vinyl bag and the toxicity and associated pathologies are numerous. (source:Lagos, Nigeria CNN)