Australian woman charged with poisoning colleague’s curry with snail pellets

An Australian woman has been charged with poisoning a colleague's curry lunch with snail pellets.A 58-year-old woman from Perth brought a container of curry to her workplace in Oldbury to share with her colleagues in February, the Western Australia police said.She and her co-workers ate the curry during a morning tea break without any issue. But when she went back to eat the leftover curry, she noticed green granules in the food.Shortly after tasting the food, she experienced numbness in her tongue. She kept the leftover as evidence and later handed it over to the police.After a months-long investigation, the police charged a 43-year-old woman, who worked in the same office and was reportedly in a “personal relationship” with the victim, with endangering the life, health or safety of another person.The police alleged the suspect accessed a chemical storage shed before returning to the staff room to add snail pellets to the curry.The police said the snail pellets contained metaldehyde, which poisoned the curry."We're just very thankful that the person who tasted the curry was aware of something that wasn't quite right," commissioner Col Blanch told reporters. The suspect is due to appear before the Armadale Magistrates Court on 5 November.This is the latest in a spate of recent incidents of people allegedly poisoning their colleagues.A Chinese microbiology graduate student in Wyoming, US, was arrested earlier this month for allegedly poisoning a colleague’s tea, then trying to flee America after police questioned her.Aili Wang, 32, was detained at the Los Angeles airport on 6 October. The student allegedly purchased a chemical called acrylamide on eBay for the poisoning. It was discovered after the alleged victim’s wife and multiple others tested water from the coffee maker he had used to brew tea.In California, a man caught on camera poisoning his colleague’s water was seeking to get the charges against him dismissed. ​David Xu was arrested in 2019 after placing toxic heavy metal cadmium in his coworker Rong Yuan’s water bottle at their workplace.David Xu pours cadmium into water bottle of Rong Yuan (Rong Yuan)​Footage recorded by a secret camera set up by Ms Yuan on her desk and shared with ABC 7 showed the perpetrator opening a small, white container and tipping its contents into his coworker’s bottle.​In the clip, recorded at Berkeley Engineering and Research, Mr Xu quickly flees before briefly returning to adjust the position of Ms Yuan’s water container.Ms Yuan said that she had become increasingly ill over two years, beginning in 2017. As her illness caused her to experience hair loss and even led to her missing work because she was vomiting, she noticed that her feelings of sickness were often preceded by her drinking from her bottle.