A total of 222 migrant construction workers have been hospitalized in a food poisoning outbreak in the Russian capital and 10 are in serious condition.

According to Nikolai Malychev, chief doctor of Moscow’s infectious diseases hospital number one, 127 labourers had been hospitalised in four Moscow hospitals, and 95 more in several Moscow region hospitals.

"The infection that led to the hospitalizations resembles salmonella," the ITAR-TASS news agency quoted Malychev as saying.

The workers came from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, and various former Soviet countries. They had been working at four building sites around the city, and according to a preliminary investigation, were struck down by food poisoning after eating a meal of grilled meat at their workplaces.

Deniz, the Turkish company that had delivered the meals, has been closed, Russia’s chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko.