Last week, I had the incredible opportunity to
speak with Dr. Hanna-Andrea Rother, the head of the Division of Environmental
Health at the UCT School of Public Health and Family Medicine. She is also the
deputy director of the Centre for Environmental and Occupational Health
Research at the school. I reached out to Rother because I am very interested in
environmental health and her publications just seemed so unique and compelling.
Fortunately, we were able to schedule an interview during the last Friday of my
study abroad trip in Cape Town, and I had a great time learning about her
impressive experiences within public health.
Originally from Michigan, Rother first came to Africa in 1985
on an exchange program with the University of Zimbabwe. Initially curious about
women’s issues, she became interested in traditional farming practices. This
opened the door into the realm of pesticides, given that these chemicals
potentially posed a threat to these practices, and Rother ended up writing her Master’s
thesis on the effectiveness of pesticide regulations in Zimbabwe. After having earned
her PhD in Environmental Sociology from Michigan State, she accepted a 6-month
position at the University Cape Town working in pesticide policy reform. Dr.
Rother has since been at UCT for over 20 years.
Rother’s research career has been primarily focused on
investigating pesticides in a variety of social and occupational settings. However,
she is committed to far more than simply advancing scientific knowledge—one of
the most important themes in her work is risk communication. “One of the nice
things about public health research is most of us do primary research, and then
we use what we have learned… and put it in our teaching, and we do quite a lot
with outreach and policy work,” explains Rother. This has included handing
flyers to hospitals, translating safety information in different languages, and
working with the city to distribute safer alternatives such as rat traps. Since
2011, Rother has been running a postgraduate diploma in risk management that
builds on the capacity of regulators, structured around the FAO and WHO’s code of
conduct on pesticide management. Rother also recently established the
environmental health track for the school’s MPH program.
When asked about the most exciting moment in her career, she
pointed to her work with a local NGO on illegal street pesticides. There exists
a high demand for these toxic agricultural pesticides due to the prevalence of
pest infestations, exacerbated by the poor socioeconomic conditions of many
urban dwellers in Cape Town. After exploring the circumstances of these local pesticide
vendors, collecting and testing the chemicals being sold illegally, and acquiring
sufficient funds for the project, Rother’s team exposed this underground world
and successfully got a pesticide removed. “What my research is trying to do for
the community is to save children’s lives, to protect people, to protect them
from long-term neurological effects,” Rother says. However, like many other
public health projects and initiatives, funding remains a critical challenge—in
addition to directly studying the risks and harm of pesticides themselves, part
of her research is highlighting how big a threat pesticides pose to the global
community.
One of Rother’s current projects involves studying the health
and safety of herbicide sprayers, specifically within the scope of climate
change. Because South Africa has a lot of alien and invasive vegetation, there
are nearly 45,000 workers all over the country using herbicides to remove these
plants. Working with the Department of Environmental Affairs, Rother’s team is looking
at how climate change is affecting the health and safety of these workers. They
are supposed to wear equipment to protect themselves from their chemicals;
however, some of them are working in excess of 38°C temperatures and heat stress
increasingly becomes more dangerous. Furthermore, the herbicides are more
likely to evaporate and be inhaled as the outside temperature rises.
Rother is also involved with an international collaboration with
the Association for Medical Education in Europe, trying to get environmental
health into medical curricula throughout the world. “A third of the burden of
disease is from environmental health factors, yet it’s not reflected in what we’re
teaching,” according to Rother. “We’re not preparing the doctors, and that is
really quite amazing. So there is a lot to do and it would be nice to have the
next generation come and do occupational and environmental health.”
-Ben
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