Children, pests and poisons: A toxic layering
Why are more and more children in Cape Town’s informal settlements being accidentally poisoned by illegal pesticides? This is the question that a multi-disciplinary group of researchers from the University of Cape Town (UCT) has spent the past 10 years working to understand. Along the way their work has also served as an example of a burgeoning health humanities in the global south.
Street pesticides for sale
In 2008, a non-governmental organisation based in Cape Town, South Africa, and working in the city’s informal settlements got in touch with Professor Andrea Rother, head of the Environmental Health Division in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at UCT and a global authority on pesticides.