Khadija Magardie
The Department of Health has acknowledged that schoolchildren in at least four provinces have been exposed to potentially lethal peanut butter by the government’s school feeding scheme, and some suppliers have been prosecuted.
These admissions come nearly two months after the Mail & Guardian revealed that the Eastern Cape Department of Health was feeding children peanut butter contaminated with aflatoxin, a cancer-producing fungus and had withheld the information.
This week the South African Medical Research Council (MRC) warned that as many as 4,8-million of the children on the government’s Primary Schools Nutrition Programme (PSNP) had been exposed to the fungus through the peanut butter on their daily sandwiches.
The MRC said this significantly increased the chances of the children developing liver cancer a direct result of aflatoxin exposure. It did, however, stress that the peanut butter affected was only that used in the PSNP, and not commercial brands.
Tests on the contaminated peanut butter used by the Eastern Cape PSNP indicated that the levels were nearly 30 times over the legal limit.
The three regions listed by the Department of Health are the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, North West and KwaZulu-Natal. Only the Eastern Cape health department authorities, where the scare was first detected, have taken the peanut butter off the menu. The other provinces continue to use it.
The entry of the contaminated foodstuffs into the system has been blamed on a lack of control measures in place manufacturers who tender to supply the peanut butter are assessed by government officials less on quality and more on cheap prices.
The national health department says “steps” have been taken against the suppliers of the contaminated foodstuffs. In some areas the batches have been returned to the manufacturers, accompanied by a warning that they face prosecution if their produce does not meet legal requirements in future.
The MRC has recommended that quality control measures be stepped up if the supply of peanut butter to the schools is to continue, adding that aflatoxin was “subject to the most stringent controls in the world”.