Eighty-five elementary school children in northern China were hospitalized after suffering food poisoning initially traced to kidney beans served in their school's cafeteria, state media said Tuesday.

The case is the latest in a string of food poisoning outbreaks that have hit the country in recent weeks, most of them at schools.

The children from the No. 4 Primary School in northern Jilin province's capital of Changchun were hospitalized Monday after suffering nausea and vomiting shortly after eating a school lunch that included kidney beans, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

By Tuesday, all but ten of the children had been released from hospital, it said. The remaining patients were stable and expected to go home in a few days, it said. The report did not give the age of the children.

The local government was investigating the case, it said.

Two mass food poisoning cases, each involving more than 200 students, were reported last month at a medical school in Heilongjiang and at a junior high school in central Shaanxi province.

Large scale food poisoning incidents regularly affect China, many of which are blamed on cooks who disregard hygiene rules or mistakenly use industrial chemicals instead of salt and other ingredients.