Pesticide Poisoning Prevention: Environmental Health Division Develops Educational Flip Chart
On 03 May, 2019 Professor Hanna-Andrea Rother, Head of the Environmental Health Division in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine, handed over the prototype of a flip chart developed by her Street Pesticide project to the City of Cape Town (CCT) Environmental Health representatives Armien Petersen (Co-ordinator Environmental Health, CCT) and Elroy Plaatjies (Principal Environmental Health Practitioner, Khayelitsha Sub District, CCT).
This was the culmination of two years of work with the Street Pesticide Reference Group (SPRG), which Prof Rother heads, comprised of public and environmental health academics, CCT Environmental Health Practitioners (EHPs), anthropologists, Poison Information Centre doctors, Western Cape government health promotion and forensic pathologists. Poisonings and deaths linked to illegal street pesticides sold in the informal sector are a serious and increasing problem in the Western Cape and nationally. The flip chart information is based on years of Prof Rother’s research findings and is meant to build the capacity of the CCT EHPs and Community Health Workers to explain to community members the health risks linked to highly hazardous street pesticides, what to do when poisoned and how to prevent pests without using pesticides. The CCT is currently translating the flip chart into IsiXhosa and Afrikaans to then be rolled out to 20 regional offices. The Division of Environmental Health will be running a training session in early June on how to use and train with the flip chart.
The flip chart was developed in collaboration with Design 4 Development and funded In conjunction with the City of Cape Town, and funding support from the Cape Higher Education Consortium (CHEC) and the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) under a Self-Initiated Research grant.
