Shock study: Eating fish from the Klip River could give you cancer
The sharptooth catfish (Clarias gariepinus) – a source of food for people living along the Klip River in Gauteng – contains high levels of toxins that can cause cancer if eaten regularly.
The river flows through Soweto, Fleurhof and Lenasia, where the catfish are consumed by residents daily.
According to a recently published study in Science of the Total Environment, the fish contain high levels of pesticides that can be extremely harmful to humans.
In some cases, the risk of contracting cancer is 1 000 times more than what is considered safe.
News24 spoke to one of the study’s authors, Professor Rialet Pieters, who is a researcher at the Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management at North-West University.
According to Pieters, there is no way of controlling the pesticides found in the fish as they are residues that occur freely in the environment. In fact, with the exception of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane (DDT), they haven’t been in use since the 1980s.