The chemical responsible for the deaths of six children in Naledi, Soweto, last month is widely sold as an illegal pesticide in informal settlements and should be banned, public health experts say.
On Monday, health minister Aaron Motsoaledi said toxicology tests confirmed the children had died from ingesting terbufos, an organophosphate insecticide registered for agricultural use in SA. It is banned in the EU.
Monica Sebetwana, 6, Ida Maama, 7, Isago Mabote, 8, Njabulo Msimanga 7, Katlego Olifant, 7, and Karabo Rampou, 9, died after eating snacks from a local spaza shop which authorities initially suspected were contaminated with pesticide.
However, tests on a packet of chips found by t police in the pocket of one dead child were negative for organophosphates, Motsoaledi said. The source of the pesticide that killed the children had yet to be determined, he said.
“We are waiting to see if the same organophosphate was found in the spaza shops, [but] so far we have not made that link,” he said.
Results were pending from the National Health Laboratory Service on swabs taken from local spaza shops, he said.
Inhabitants of poor urban townships are plagued by pest infestations and turn to informal vendors for “street pesticides” that were either registered agricultural products that were too hazardous to be safely used in domestic settings, or unregistered products that were imported illegally, said Prof Andrea Rother, head of the environmental health division at the University of Cape Town’s school of public health.
Registered products were typically decanted into small, unlabelled containers and sold for domestic use, while unregistered products were imported, mostly from China, already packaged.
This is not a new problem. We have been trying for many years to get the products banned
— Andrea Rother, head of the environmental health division at the University of Cape Town’s school of public health
“This is not a new problem. We have been trying for many years to get the products banned because of the lack of control in preventing them getting onto the street,” Rother said.
Terbufos was responsible for more than half the deaths of children who died of acute pesticide poisoning in Cape Town’s western metropole from 2010 to 2019, according to a study co-authored by Rother that was published in BMC Public Health last year.
Toxicological analysis was conducted in 50 of the 54 cases of paediatric pesticide poisoning recorded at the Salt River mortuary, and 29 were found to be due to terbufos.
Terbufos became widely used in informal settlements after the agriculture department banned the chemical aldicarb in 2016, Rother said. Aldicarb was previously used as rat poison. Both products could be formulated as small, dark grey granules and looked similar to the naked eye, she said.
Reducing access to hazardous chemicals such as terbufos needed to go hand-in-hand with the provision of safer alternatives, she said.
Public health consultant Maria van der Merwe said the EU and many other high-income countries had taken terbufos off their list of approved agricultural pesticides, but it was widely used in many low- and middle-income countries.
In Taiwan, for example, terbufos-contaminated millet had recently been linked to the deaths of three people and hospitalisation of eight others, she said.
“There is a call, including by the UN, to (ban) it,” she said.
Many agencies were responsible for ensuring food and the premises in which it was sold were free of dangerous chemicals, she said.
These included the police service and environmental health practitioners employed by local municipalities.
Business Day previously reported SA is woefully short of environmental health practitioners, with barely a quarter of the number recommended by the World Health Organisation.
This story has been updated with comment by experts.
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