Load shedding, winter expected to fuel burn injuries
Nikki Allorto braces herself before she takes a big bite of a tiny red pepper. As her eyes widen, she gulps the potent chilli down and passes the torch.
Allorto works with the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health and founded the Burn Care Trust. She is one of several health workers who recently posted videos of themselves ingesting spicy food like chillies and Tabasco sauce.
As their mouths burn, they hope to raise awareness about burn injuries in South Africa. Dubbed “Burn4Burns,” the campaign borrows from the 2014 viral Ice Bucket Challenge, which aimed to increase awareness about the debilitating neurological condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. As part of the challenge, people dumped buckets of ice water on their heads and nominated others to do the same.
Burn injuries affect thousands of people every year and can have a lasting impact on survivor’s mental and physical health, according to specialist plastic surgeon and Secretary of the South African Burn Society Dr Maria Giaquinto-Cilliers.
[quote float= right]Many burn injuries are a result of accidents which occurred during load shedding”
Giaquinto-Cilliers added that poverty play a major role in burn deaths as many continue to live in high-density informal housing and rely on poorly secured paraffin stoves. She adds that load shedding may also be playing a role.
“Candles are used for a light source and open fires for warmth,” she told OurHealth. “This is perpetuated by load shedding, which forces people to improvise for sources of heat and light.”
“Many burn injuries are a result of accidents which occurred during load shedding,” said Giaquinto-Cilliers. As head of Kimberly Hospital’s plastic, reconstructive and burn surgery unit, said Giaquinto-Cilliers added that many burn survivors have also been purposely attacked with boiling water.
If nominees can’t take the heat, Giaquinto-Cilliers said they are welcomed to donate time or money to a burn charity instead of eating something hot.
The campaign comes as fire warnings were recently issued in Limpopo, which has seen a high number of house fires in the rural Mutale area, according to Nditsheni Magidi from the Disaster Management Department in Limpopo’s Vhembe District.
Divhani Masutha from the local fire department cautioned people to avoid fires by safely disposing of cigarette butts, keeping children away from matches and refraining from using paraffin or petrol to start cooking fires. He added that cooking oil fires should not be doused with water. Instead, oil fires should be smothered using a blanket.
Recently, the South African Burn Society has also started the Recycle Me campaign that allows people to donate thin layers of skin to help burn victims heal.
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Load shedding, winter expected to fuel burn injuries
by ndivhuwomusetha, Health-e News
July 15, 2015