BY LORETTA B MANELE
There are several health impacts of oil spills on coastal communities.
Sheridan Rabbitt of Rabbitt Consulting stressed on this at the “Strengthening Marine Pollution Incident Resilience in the Pacific Islands” workshop that will end today at the Heritage Park Hotel.
She said there are a couple of health direct impacts of oil spills on coastal communities.
Speaking of coastal communities, Rabbit said there are harvesters who will be out in the marine environment and if oil is washing up on the shore and if they get into the water to try to harvest seafood there’s going to be direct contact with oil.
“There’s going to be health implications as a result of that direct contact”
She added that if they then consume the seafood, they’ve collected given that the seafood has been touched by oil they will have impacts from the consumption of contaminated foods.
Rabbitt mentioned that water source is also another important aspect of people’s livelihoods that can get contaminated when oil spills turn up in the first couple of weeks.
She said a lot of our remote villages in Solomon Islands don’t always have access to a lot of fresh water and in some cases depending on where the water source is coming from it might also be contaminated.
Rabbitt stated that there are also gendered impacts in the health sector because women are more often in direct contact with saltwater when they’re harvesting seafood more frequently than men who are often fishing from boats.
“So, for our health sector that’s something that we really need to be thinking about”
