Freshman lands in hospital with alcohol poisoning

The 17 year-old female Quad resident was taken to HUP Friday morning. and Brian D'Ottavio A female freshman was rushed to the hospital early Friday morning after passing out due to an alcohol-related illness. Paramedics arrived in the Quadrangle a little before 1 a.m. to take the 17-year-old victim to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. "She looked horrible. It was scary," said one witness, who saw the victim taken from her dorm room in Community House. Friends of the victim said she consumed about 10 mixed drinks and at least two shots of tequila at a hotel party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. Each room in the fraternity house served a different type of mixed drink. When she started feeling sick, two of her friends took her back to the Quad at around midnight. Once they returned, the victim started throwing up and "was not responsive to anyone," a friend said. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, her friends notified their resident advisor, who called for an ambulance. According to witnesses, two ambulances and several police cars arrived, and the unconscious victim was taken out of her room in a stretcher. The University has traditionally maintained a policy where students who seek help for themselves or friends are not punished for underage drinking. In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, the victim said she was treated in the emergency room with intravenous fluids to rehydrate her body and received an oxygen tube in her nose because she was having trouble breathing. But doctors did not need to pump her stomach. Hospital officials declined to comment other than to confirm that the victim was treated in HUP's emergency room. The girl was discharged at about 5:13 a.m. and returned to her dorm. She spent Friday recovering in her room. The incident comes on the heels of another alcohol-related illness reported last weekend, when a freshman in Ware College House in the Quad was hospitalized. It also comes less than a week after the University released a 10-page report outlining strategies for combatting binge drinking, defined as five or more drinks for men and four or more for women. The report makes a sweeping set of recommendations, including improving collection of data on binge drinking, notifying parents after any alcohol-related incident involving a student and scheduling more classes on Fridays to discourage students from beginning weekend drinking on Thursday nights. College junior Jon Fenkel, a member of the AEPi executive board, would not comment on the situation. He deferred to the president and Wharton junior Dan Tehrani. Tehrani did not respond to repeated phone calls. Inter Fraternity Council President and College senior Josh Belinfante said he does not think that fraternities should be blamed for problems resulting from binge drinking. "Social organizations in this country use alcohol," he explained. "To say that we as a system could eliminate hospitalization is ridiculous. We are trying to educate our members, which is more than anyone else is doing." Another recent report, issued by the Harvard School of Public Health and published in the September issue of the Journal of American College Health, showed that about 40 percent of college students nationwide routinely binge drink. The study also noted that the number of drinkers who had binged three or more times in the past month increased by 22 percent over the past four years. Drinking to get drunk was up 33 percent over the same period. Daily Pennsylvanian staff writer Catherine Lucey contributed to this article.

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