Ms. Becky Nancy Aloo, a Tutorial Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences, School of Science won the best poster presenter at The NACOSTI conference/National Science week. It was held Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC) from the 22nd to 26th of May, 2017. The theme of the conference was ‘Research, Technology and Innovation to address Climate Change’.
She made a poster presentation at the conference with the title ‘Evaluation of microbial load in sun-dried and industrially packaged silver cyprinids (Rastrineobola argentea)’ out of a research done alongside Tieli Monica., a former student at the Department of Biological Sciences and Dr. Lizzy Mwamburi, a senior lecturer in the same department who supervised their work.
The presentation was listed under the subtheme ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Food Security’. The work was relevant to this theme because ‘Food security’ encompasses several areas including sufficiency, nutrition and safety of the food (World Food Summit in 1996). So, it’s not enough to look at sufficient production and nutritional content of different types of food but also the risks that come with consumption of food. In the context of climate change, it is becoming increasingly important to harness knowledge concerning foods that can be available to consumers at all times even when agricultural activities are reduced to a minimum because of the uncertainties of weather conditions, failed rains, unreliable weather patterns and other uncertainties and small scale fishing is one such area especially because such fish are loaded with saturated fats such as the omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids, do not contain the bad cholesterols and also contain micronutrients which can be very essential in solving issues of malnutrition, hidden hunger or undernutrition that come with food insecurity issues especially in the wake of climate change.
The research is still on-going and collaborators from fisheries and nutrition departments are welcome so that they can work together as the team is still looking at microbial contamination of other types of fish and the risks associated with their consumption.
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