Ndumiso Ngcobo’s listeria hysteria

Whew! What a rollercoaster of a week it’s been! This is after the TV personality, communications manager and Department of Health PR officer who sometimes moonlights as health minister, Dr Aaron “Celebrity” Motsoaledi, announced that the source of the listeriosis outbreak had been identified.

In his defence, I’m grateful that at least Celeb Aaron sat in front of those cameras and told us straight up, “Take your polony, your viennas, your Russians, and throw them into the sea.” (Well, metaphorically. We don’t want the bodies of people called Dimitri and Vladimir to start washing up on Clifton beaches.)

I’m grateful that Famous Aaron was honest because there was a time, not too long ago, when we might have been bombarded with a microbiology lecture from the Union Buildings instead, culminating in a soundbite along the lines of “No bacterium can cause an outbreak”. And we would have sat there lapping it all up while munching on our salami sandwiches. The official word from the Health Ministry might have been that we add onion rings, gherkins and a splash of sweet chilli sauce in our polony sandwiches to keep safe.

The health minister has received a lot of backlash on the various media platforms and social media for his handling of this listeriosis crisis. The most obvious criticism is that when it was referred to as a “crisis”, his response was basically, “What crisis?”, which is an attitude that South

Africans have become very accustomed to.

He then deferred to that fashionable South Africanism, “But we’re not the only ones! Even ‘civilised’ countries have it!” while pointing in the direction of Australia, where a recent outbreak of listeriosis claimed three lives. The clever folks of Black Twitter wondered out loud if Flashlights Aaron was suggesting that one Australian life was equivalent to 60 South African lives, seeing as our death toll was 180.

And then there was criticism levelled at the minister for going around telling us to be extra vigilant with our hygiene and to wash our hands at least 10 times a day, especially before handling food.

I don’t get this criticism. It seemed to me to be the most obvious thing in the world, along the lines of “switch on your headlights when driving at night”. Like, duh! We’re all supposed to wash our hands as often as possible, aren’t we? OK, fair enough, I suffer from a mild case of OCD with a heavy slant towards germophobia.

I recently kept a log of how many times I washed my hands between 10am and 6pm and discovered that I’d washed them 37 times. In my defence, I had prepared a pretty elaborate dinner in between. As everyone knows, you can’t grab brinjals after handling tuna steak. This is where the AWB and I see eye to eye: “tuna bacteria for tuna and brinjal bacteria for brinjals”. They must never meet in their respective raw states.

One of the primary reasons I carry a murse (man purse) is so that I always have a tube of hand sanitiser with me, which I use liberally. Unlike my fellow germophobe and colleague at Kaya FM, Sandile van Heerden, who treats the world like a leper colony by avoiding handshakes at all costs, I shake people’s hands all the time. But I do it begrudgingly. And then I have to wash my hands afterwards. Or apply generous dollops of sanitiser, as surreptitiously as possible to avoid offending people.

I do not know why people are so offended by sensible folks who are averse to physical contact. As this listeriosis crisis (I insist it’s a crisis, ostrich minister!) has shown us, hygiene is a serious matter! But most people just couldn’t be bothered.

After a wedding in December, during which I uncharacteristically consumed mass-prepared food, I was violently ill. I have not eaten polony in over a decade since visiting a polony manufacturing unit. Now I’m adding all processed meat to that list. Only because I should have done so ages ago.

And I can neither confirm nor deny that during the writing of this column I washed my hands 11 times. At least now no one will look at me funny.

“Spock. That’s no alien. That’s last night’s polony.”

I shake people’s hands all the time. But I do it begrudgingly. And then I have to wash my hands afterwards.