Nearly 300 female workers at Pontus Footwear Ltd in Takeo province’s Tram Kak district fainted on Monday after another female worker got injured, the factory’s representative Heng Peng Kheang said.

He told The Post that a female worker, Sorn Sophorn, 28, injured her finger when it got caught in a machine. This frightened the other workers and started a chain reaction of fainting spells, affecting 273 of them.

Peng Kheang said he and administration staff sought help from Tram Kak district police, the provincial Labour Department and the National Social Security Fund to send the victims to the Tram district health centre and the provincial hospital for treatment.

“After seeing so many workers faint, at 9am we decided to let all the workers take a day off,” Peng Kheang said.

Duk Thiya, the district police chief, who helped send the injured workers to the hospital and health centre and spoke directly to the women, told The Post that the cause of the fainting episode was the shock of seeing a co-worker bleeding so profusely.

“The remarkable thing is that the injured worker did not faint, but others fainted. The doctor said it was caused by the shock and fear when they saw so much blood or when they saw their co-workers fainting next to them,” Thiya said.

He said most of the women who received treatment had already returned home by Monday afternoon.