Failed supervision by the owner of a Chinese kindergarten led to the death of two young girls who went into convulsions minutes after eating yogurt spiked with poison.

"This is an extreme case showing the lack of supervision in preschool education," said Yuan Ailing, a professor of primary education from the School of Life Sciences at East China Normal University.

"The local governments need to increase the financial support for kindergartens, and control the new private ones if the districts have enough kindergartens," added Ailing.

Authorities from the Hebei province in northeast China said a woman who ran a kindergarten program in Pingshan County admitted to combining yogurt with rat poison in hopes a child from a rival school would eat it.

After injecting the sealed yogurt container with rat poison, the woman asked a man, who is also being detained, to leave the yogurt cup beside some notebooks on the road of a rival kindergarten, China Daily reported.

When the grandmother of two students from the opposing school saw the yogurt, she picked it up and brought it home for the girls to eat. As the two girls ingested the contents of the yogurt, they began to convulse and foam from the mouth. They died soon after.

Reports claim that the two privately-owned kindergartens were competing for enrollment numbers and the decision to poison current students was seen as a way to deter parents from sending their children to the other institution.

Recently the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved the removal of consumer market 12 D-Con brand mouse and rat poison due to harmful side effects.