The National Institute for Communicable Diseases has warned of increased health risks due to the floods experienced in parts of the country.
Medical Epidemiologist Linda Erasmus said that while acute events like drowning and trauma are by far the most common risks, disruption of environmental health infrastructure can cause a variety of other infections.
Erasmus said:"You do get disruption of water supplies and sewerage and obviously that increases the risk of contamination of your water and our real diseases. "But when you have people in shelters, you've got mass displacement of people, there's crowding, the hygiene is not always easy, sanitation can be a problem.""All of those things also encourage the transmission of respiratory pathogens as well. So respiratory infections also happen."
"And then certain diseases often in the acute events during a flood, you get soft tissue, you get trauma, and that can lead to soft tissue infections as well. And then the last two are the zoonosis which are infections that are transmitted between animals and humans, and then other vector borne diseases."
"And those are the diseases that are transmitted through the bite of an insect such as a mosquito or tick and often changes in the environment can often lead to increases in those kind of vectors and those kind of diseases. So for example you can get stagnant pools of water that are ideal breeding sites for mosquitos and we know that mosquitoes transmit malaria."
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