Burn survivors: SA’s forgotten people

Cast your mind back to the last time you saw in public—a supermarket, a restaurant, on television—a person with severe burns injuries. Unless your family or professional environment includes a burns survivor, count how many such people you know.

Even though thousands fall victim to burns every year, individuals with severe burn injuries are South Africa’s forgotten people. They are often ostracised, or feel ostracised, because of their appearance. Many withdraw from society and disappear from public view altogether.

Children especially are vulnerable when their appearance makes schooling and other forms of engaging with their peers difficult. Many reach adulthood with little by way of education and skills when they enter a job market that already is difficult to access for burns survivors.

It is perplexing that the government should not accord burns survivors the option to apply for disability grants, as we report this week.

The government might claim that in theory a burns survivor could obtain employment. In practice, however, people with burns often have sparse employment opportunities, either because their physical appearance dissuades potential employers from offering them a position, or because their skin damage (especially hand injuries) precludes the performance of many tasks.

It is an injustice that burns survivors who are virtually unemployable—often due to public prejudice—are excluded from receiving state assistance. As it casts aside its moral duty to care for burns survivors, the state compounds the societal marginalisation of already vulnerable people.

The state is facing further challenges in the field of burns, especially those sustained in fires.

The government must be proactive in implementing burn prevention strategies.

Prevention education should not be left exclusively to firefighters, non-governmental organisations and interested individuals, though these do have an important role to play. It would be wholly beneficial on many levels if comprehensive fire prevention education was included in school curricula and extended to those communities most at risk, with a view to modifying behaviour and environments.

Especially among South Africa’s poorest, the consequences of a fire started by negligence or accident in one home can be devastating to a whole community. The government must take concrete steps to encourage greater fire safety in high-risk environments especially.

This requires not only education in the community with a view to broadening safety consciousness, but also the introduction of safer appliances, especially those fuelled by paraffin, a major cause of shack fires in particular.

Such appliances are already available, but often outside the financial reach of those who need them most. Much good would be accomplished and many disasters averted if the government would subsidise the distribution of such appliances for those who cannot afford to buy them outright.

At the same time, the government might consider offering incentives to the development of products and projects that will enhance safety from burns (including those caused by chemicals), and apply sanctions on those that are hazardous—if necessary by introducing regulatory legislation.

However, for many South Africans living with the burn injuries such prevention strategies would come too late. A moral obligation rests on the state and on society to secure the reintegration of burn survivors into all walks of South African life.