The V&A Waterfront, in Cape Town, has been accused of poisoning patrons, including a six-year-old child, after it allowed a deadly, banned pesticide to be sprayed around a popular eatery and its public spaces this week.
Now several customers have spoken of their horror after being caught in the spray drift of the pesticide and how they suffered severe headaches and nausea within minutes of being exposed.
On Monday, the V&A’s maintenance team sprayed Pyrinex 480 EC, a highly hazardous pesticide, around plant boxes, flower beds, pavements and the parking lot directly outside Mugg & Bean and a dental emporium.
The active ingredient is chlorpyrifos, a deadly organophosphate nerve toxin, developed during WWII “to kill people”, according to Jurgen Schirmacher, the chairman of the Tatib Foundation, which campaigns for the safe use of pesticides.
The government banned chlorpyrifos in domestic and garden pesticides in May last year.
But the V&A said on Friday, that it had only now been made aware that a banned pesticide had been “inadvertently sprayed on the premises”.
It claimed that it was old stock and that it took delivery of the product in 2009 before it was banned. “We were not aware of the fact that the substance was subsequently banned,” it said.
But a supplier of the product has confirmed that the numbers affixed to a paper sticker on the container of the product used at the V&A indicates that the product was made in June 2011.
“It was made in June therefore its impossible that they purchased it in September 2009,” said Schirmacher.
“It has always been a highly toxic product and only for use in agriculture, far away from the public,” he added.
Symptoms of poisoning include headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, convulsions, muscle spasms that may lead to muscle paralysis and in an extreme case, death by suffocation. Early or pre-natal exposure is linked to childhood autism and attention deficit disorder.
A Camps Bay businessman, who did not want to be identified, said he had taken his six-year-old son for breakfast at the Mugg & Bean.
“We were sitting behind a pillar when all a sudden there was this unbelievable smell in the air. I kept turning around and trying to work out where it was coming from. There were another two or three tables around us.
“My son told me: ‘Dad there’s a guy standing with a mask behind the pillar.’ He must have been 2m behind us. I got up and chased the guy away.
The man moved off and continued spraying elsewhere.
“When we got home, my child’s nose started bleeding. It was completely weird and then it bled again a few hours later. I’m a little concerned for my son. He seems fine. But I don’t know the degree of damage done to him, or to the people sitting around me.”
A Durbanville housewife, who also did not want to be named, described how she had been in bed since the incident.
“I feel terrible. When I came out of the dentist’s office, I caught the guy in the act.
“He was spraying the pesticide from a knapsack all over the Mugg & Bean. When I inhaled the spray, I immediately got a very bad headache.”
Moments later, she was nauseous and vomiting and has spent the week ill and extremely tired.
“How can they spray this stuff when people are sitting eating lunch outside and where people are walking? Children are playing in front of the shop fronts.”
Her husband, who was in a business meeting at the Mugg & Bean, is now complaining of muscle aches, neck and back spasms, and headaches while her daughter, who drove her to the dentist, “feels out of her body”.
The housewife said: “I spent my whole birthday in bed. I felt like I was dying… The waterfront is not a farm.
“That is an agricultural concentrate that is so poisonous it is only allowed to be used by farmers. The V&A were illegal from the start. They can’t plead ignorance now. Ignorance won’t cure me.”
Schirmacher agrees: “Even pest control operators are not allowed to use the product as its highly toxic…
“They have thus broken the law by spraying an agricultural chemical onto the grounds of the V&A.
He said there would be “serious health problems” further down the line for those affected.
He said the foundation had discovered that V&A employees “were often seen spraying the planter boxes, flower beds and public areas”.
But the V&A said it was reviewing its processes to ensure “that something like this” did not happen again. - Saturday Star