On Monday March 13th, David Dillon delivered a presentation to the Social Change & Development Working Group (co-authored with Alyson Young), titled, “The Socioecology of Household Toxin Exposure in Eastern Zambia”. David Dillon is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and Alyson Young is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UF. The talk presented an analysis of data on Aflatoxins collected from three areas in the eastern province of Zambia. Aflatoxins are toxins produced by fungi or mold found on agricultural products, and Dillon and Young estimate that 45% of residents of Zambia are exposed.
Research on aflatoxins first began in the 1960’s after increasing incidents of poultry cancers were found in poultry farms in the US. When ingested by humans, aflatoxins cause health problems, as well as change vulnerabilities to other health issues. Agricultural products contaminated with aflatoxins cannot be made better by boiling or cooking the food, and contamination can be passed on through animal meat and/or excrement. For instance, if a contaminated ground nut is consumed by a chicken, for instance, that chicken can pass on the contamination to humans if slaughtered and consumed.
In collecting the data in the Eastern Province of Zambia, the researchers first collected data on the perceived risk of aflatoxins by residents. Individuals were asked to rank health risks within their community and then focus groups compared these risks with aflatoxin risks. Overall, aflatoxin outreach is mostly received by men through agricultural outreach programs, while aflatoxin education is not included in nutrition outreach which is typically targeted to women. While aflatoxin contamination also effects corn, the small-scale farmers at the focus of this research are ground-nut farmers. Though mold (a sign of the highly increased likelihood of aflatoxin contamination) is sometimes visible on contaminated groundnuts, it is much safer to hand sort the ground nuts and remove any ground nut whose shell is broken (another likely sign of contamination). Through this research, it was found that people had a great deal of understanding about aflatoxins but that they weren’t necessarily changing their practices. One problematic practice which continues and is related to household levels of income is the practice of taking higher-quality groundnuts for sale at market and leaving lower-quality groundnuts, which are more likely to be contaminated, for home consumption.