Deadly chemicals linked to rise in poisonings, suicides

Last month, Cindy Stephen received a call on the Poisons Information Centre helpline from a concerned doctor at a hospital in Mpumalanga. His patient was gravely ill.

- Sheree Bega

“He had intentionally drunk some weed killer about four days prior. He had a period of severe stress,” said Stephen, the director of the centre at the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in Cape Town.

“He was treated at the clinic and he was discharged a day or two later, being well.”

Two days later, the man was back in hospital. “He was struggling to breathe, even with oxygen. His eyes were yellow, his liver had failed, he had kidney damage and severe ulcers in his mouth,” Stephen said.

The weed killer was in an unmarked container, but the symptoms were classic of paraquat, a highly hazardous pesticide banned in 50 countries, but widely used in South Africa to control weeds. There are few treatment options and death is almost inevitable.

“It’s tragic. There is absolutely no way that such a toxic chemical should be available to anybody, let alone as easily as this man could obviously access it,” Stephen said.

She was making a presentation on the health effects of agropesticide exposure at a national colloquium hosted by the department of agriculture.

Stephen presented data collected since 2015 from the Poisons Information Centre helpline, Tygerberg Hospital’s Poison Information Centre and the national notifiable medical condition system.

The helpline receives more than 13 000 calls a year from across South Africa, mostly from doctors. The database now has more than 132 000 case records.

“We obviously deal with exposures and poisonings to many substances and pesticides account for about 12%,” Stephen said.