With every rasping breath Priscilla Govender takes the pain is visible on her face. The air clanks in her lungs as it struggles to move through the mucus in her respiratory system and she can barely speak.
For a 47-year-old, she is frail, looking and moving like someone almost twice her age.
Priscilla’s daughter, Pamela, continuously feeds her a bronchial dilator from an asthmatic pump: ”She is very bad this morning,” says Pamela. ”We can’t afford a nebuliser and one night she was so bad that she fainted, we had to call the ambulance three times to come and nebulise her. Sometimes the ambulance takes three or four hours to get here.”
”A lot of people [in Merebank] suffer, just recently three people suffered from asthma attacks and before the ambulance could get here they died,” says Priscilla, almost every second word punctuated by a wheezing gasp for air. Pamela’s six-year-old daughter, Adriana, hasn’t gone to school today, her mother says she has a fever and has been coughing and vomiting recently.
In Durban’s south basin — where low-income residential suburbs such as Wentworth and Merebank are situated next door to oil refineries and industry — respiratory problems such as asthma, bronchitis and chest pains are commonplace. So too are nausea, birth defects, leukaemia and other cancers. Walking around the neighbourhood, the smell of benzene (a carcinogen and by-product of the refining process) is omnipresent, its taste cloaks the back of the throat with every breath.
A R6,2-million study on the impact of environmental pollution on the health of communities in the area will be released on Friday, vindicating claims by the community that the pollution caused by heavy industry in the area, especially the Sapref (South African Petroleum Refinery owned by multinationals BP and Shell) and Engen refineries, has been responsible for the high incidence of these illnesses.
It also sends a tragic warning to residents about their susceptibility to not just respiratory illness, but also cancer.
Commissioned by local government and conducted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Medical School’s Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health over the past three years, the study compared the health of primary school children at certain schools in Wentworth, Merebank and the neighbouring suburbs of Austerville and the Bluff with those from suburbs to the north, such as Newlands East and KwaMashu.
Confirming a direct correlation between pollution and illness, the report states that ”the pollution is arising from the petrochemical industry and other major fossil fuel users, including motor vehicles”.
The study found that the incidence of persistent asthma among school children in the south basin was almost twice as high as that among counterparts from the north of Durban. It also found that bronchial hyperactivity was two-and-a-half times higher in the south basin compared to areas in the north.
After testing the ambient air (the air people breathe every day) the study found that over a lifetime the risk of contracting cancer in the south basin was 25 in every 100 000 people, which, according to Bobby Peek, director of groundWork, an environmental group that has been working in the area for the past 10 years, ”is way above the global acceptable level.
”The global norm is one in every million people or one in every 100 000 people who have been exposed to one form of chemical contamination and the scary thing is that the research finds that this might not be the worst case scenario,” said Peek.
”The study also found that even when pollution levels were lower than the World Health Organisation and South African standards, people were still being affected. That means standards must be stronger, but also that people have been living there exposed to these chemicals for so long that their health is now being affected by much lower levels,” said Peek.
Peek commended the city council for taking ”such a bold step to undertake and support this research” but added that now was the time for more stringent legislation and monitoring of the oil refineries, which have, in the past, underreported sulphur dioxide emissions and have been responsible for emissions above World Health Organisation norms as recently as last year.
Peek said that the communities could use the study to ”call on the government to act urgently and even seek legal measures against it, if they felt not enough was being done in terms of legislation and monitoring”.