Understanding South African herbicide workers’ residual take-home exposure risks from personal protective equipment cleaning and storing practices

Exposure to pesticides has been associated with several adverse health effects. When workers who spray pesticides take contaminated Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and work clothes home, those items pose a risk of cross-contamination. Agriculture employers are recommended to make facilities available for workers to clean and store contaminated items at the workplace to reduce the risk of cross-contamination. However, little research has been conducted on forestry workers, for whom at-work cleaning and storage facilities may be less feasible. Working for Water (WfW) is a South African programme that focuses on removing invasive alien vegetation and alleviating poverty through providing job opportunities to unemployed individuals in low-income settings. WfW forestry workers use herbicides to remove the invasive vegetation. Unlike agricultural workers, WfW forestry workers undertake projects that are transient and tend to be on mountainous or steep terrain. The work environment poses challenges for at-work access to amenities or facilities to clean and store contaminated PPE. Workers have few alternatives but to take contaminated items home. WfW safety protocols do not currently address the risks associated with take-home residues or indicate how workers should clean and store contaminated items. This study is part of a larger project focusing on developing protocols to reduce the risks of cross-contamination and exposure to residues. This dissertation provides baseline data for improved WfW safety protocols through the exploration of workers’ at-home risks of cross-contamination, and the role that worker perceptions and access to amenities have on cleaning and storing behaviors for contaminated items. The Protocol (Part A) describes the methods used to collect and analyze the data. The Literature Review (Part B) presents the risks of take-home residues associated with cross-contamination and the importance of exploring workers’ perceptions and access to amenities to promote safety compliance. The Article (Part C) explores WfW workers’ cleaning and storing behaviors, what contaminated items are taken home, the workers’ access to amenities in the home, and the workers’ perceived risk of exposure. Questionnaires were administered to 27 WfW workers across three excavation sites (Tokai, Citrusdal and Hermanus) that were selected based on convenience sampling. Findings showed that most of the participants took contaminated items home daily. Many participants (55.2%) did not have access to running water. Access to running water and type of housing influenced whether the contaminated items were washed indoors or outdoors, and how they were washed. WfW participants who lived in a shack were more likely to leave contaminated items on the couch or bed or with other clothing items than those living in permanent dwellings. Those workers were more likely to keep them in a non-permeable transport bag, outside, or separate drawers away from clean items. The majority of subjects (65.5%) perceived exposure to herbicides as dangerous to their health. The participants’ perceived risk was associated with whether they took contaminated PPE items home, but not how they were cleaned or stored. WfW Safety protocols should emphasize the importance of keeping contaminated items contained and reducing contact with household surfaces or clean clothes. Workers’ cleaning and storing practices and their associated risk of crosscontamination are largely determined by the amenities they have access to. For new safety protocols to be effective, they need to be realistic and take into account the constraints workers face

Routes to Sophiatown

What is Sophiatown? Is it vibrant black, urbanity, or a more tragic recollection: the suburb that was destroyed by the apartheid state’s forced removals of black South Africans from areas proclaimed white from the 1950s onwards. Both of these representations have considerable contemporary traction. The former lends itself to a very nostalgic view of the suburb, the South African rainbow nation transported into a multi- cultural and co-operative past, while anti -apartheid commemorative initiatives highlight the removals beginning in February 1955. Neither of these representations, though, reflects the entirety of Sophiatown’s histories, including of when it was called Triomf. This article brings together the different histories and representations of Sophiatown, showing their messy connection with one another, through a consideration of two linked sets of ideas: in the first place, space viewed as socially-produced draws attention to the multiply -constructed nature of the landscape known as Sophiatown. In the second, attention to the quotidian accounts which Sophiatown residents produce about their lives reveals the way in which space and place (house and home, daily travel routes) work to overlap the familiar with the unfamiliar. The first set of ideas looks to ideas of space as politically - contingent, the second to the processual role it plays in how people remember their everyday lives

‘Brought into Manhood’ : Christianity and Male Initiation in South Africa in the Early 20th Century

Abstract: In 1922, Umboneli Wezinto (Brilliant Observer) wrote a letter in isiXhosa to the black South African newspaper, Umteteli wa Bantu. In it, he described circumcision as part of the ‘The National Custom’, ‘this matter was set up by God. Circumcision is a sacrament that God gave to mankind’.1 Twenty years later, lay workers and preachers at St Cuthbert’s, an Anglican mission in the Transkei, put forward a different position as they debated Xhosa male initiation practices during one of their quarterly meetings. ‘Christians should work for the uplift of their people and for the abandonment of the custom’.2 These two vignettes show some of the contradictions inherent in African thinking and practice concerning tradition in South Africa in the first half of the 20th century. Between the mid 19th and early 20th centuries, contests over initiation evolved from complete missionary condemnation to substantial accommodation within mainstream Christianity. This change was the result of African Christians engaging their missionary counterparts in a series of debates that continually reiterated the importance of initiation. This process was a delicate one, since it also brought African Christians into conflict with their traditional communities. In this article, I show, through an examination of initiation in a wide range of mission and printed sources, the innovation that African Christians brought to the consideration of custom. Some of this centred on relocating both the practice and the discussion of custom from the secrecy that cloaked its traditional practice to more public spaces. With regard to practice, African Christians went to great lengths either to continue initiation outside the Church or to Christianise it. In published and textual spaces, especially newspapers, they defied customary prohibitions on discussing circumcision, using a range of arguments based on Christian precedent and the Bible both to defend and to denounce it. While men from across South Africa participated in the newspaper discussions, Xhosa men were the most ardent defenders of the practice, emphasising its role in the constitution of Xhosa masculinity..

Southern African christianities and mission effort under review

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RENDERING SERVICES IN CHILD AND YOUTH CARE CENTRES: EXPERIENCES AND CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL WORKERS

Effective social work services in child and youth care centres (CYCCs) depend on how social workers deal with the associated experiences and challenges. This study explored social workers’ experiences and challenges in rendering services in CYCCs in the Tshwane municipal district. A qualitative research approach employing the phenomenological design was adopted, and in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted. The findings confirmed that social workers have various positive and negative experiences and face multiple challenges in rendering services in CYCCs. Several suggestions to improve service delivery in CYCCs are made

Sophiatown

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Constructing confidence intervals for polarization mode dispersion

Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) causes significant impairment in high bit-rate optical telecommunications systems. Knowledge of a fibre’s PMD mean value, and the relevant confidence interval, is essential for determining a fibre’s maximum allowable bit-rate. Various methods of confidence interval construction for time series data were tested in this dissertation using simulation. These included the autocovariance-matrix methods as suggested by Box and Jenkins, as well as the more practical and simpler batch means methods. Some of these methods were shown to be significantly better than the standard method of calculating confidence intervals for non time series data. The best of the tested methods were used on actual PMD data. The effect of using polarization scramblers was also tested

Property Rights in Space: Moving the Goal Posts so the Players don't Notice

Elsewhere in "Rethinking Terra Nullius and Property in Space", I have argued that due to the changing circumstances of access to space by private entities rather than governments, the current legal situation with regard to ownership in space should be reconsidered. As it stands, ownership in space is governed by international law and currently private and even national ownership of celestial bodies is prohibited. While (controversially) arguing for the recognition of private ownership in space, I constantly have to field questions surrounding the pragmatic assertion that since international law and United Nations treaties and conventions prohibit ownership in space, there can be no development that will allow for this. Hence, while not abandoning my purely property law-oriented arguments for recognising private ownership in and on celestial bodies, I will maintain my arguments for property rights in space and analyse a number of differing options available to private entities who would like to acquire property rights in space. As such, I purposefully avoid the maligned terminology of "ownership", and rather look at various other options that still give the intrepid celestial entrepreneur some sort of property right, or even a property-like protection of their interests in space. Some examples include concessions, mining licences, prospecting rights, and certain contractual rights that could benefit from property-like protection. The thesis is that even if ownership of celestial objects is not accepted due to the existence of various problematic dogmatic viewpoints, one would still be able to achieve much the same effect by using other property mechanisms.     &nbsp

Introduction to Virtual Property: Lex Virtualis Ipsa Loquitur

This article serves as an introduction to the concept of virtual property and also to very briefly note the relevance of virtual property in modern society. A universally accepted definition of virtual property is hard to come by, but the paper will aim to provide some clarity on the issue. Virtual property is still property, and it still exists even though it is intangible. It includes (amongst other things) website addresses and email addresses as well as certain other accepted immaterial property objects such as bank accounts, stocks, options and derivatives. Indeed, one can go so far as to include digital goods, such as digital versions of books (e-books), computer or smartphone programmes or apps, television series and movies as well as digital music (albums and tracks) as objects of virtual property. However, the focus in this paper is on the type of virtual property found inside virtual worlds. The discussion of virtual property will be facilitated by reference to some of the ancillary and more complicated areas of the field to serve as a point of reference leading to an understanding of the concept of virtual property in general.  &nbsp