Photo credit: Toronto Today
Last fall, UUniversity of Toronto medical student Kanish Baskaran observed doctors perform an amputation on the foot of an unhoused patient suffering from a severe foot infection.
Toronto Today reports that Baskaran said the amputation may have been prevented, if only the person had access to clean socks.
“A lot of infections – things like necrosis, gangrene, trench foot – when you’re out i8n the cold it gets worse, and especially if you’re wearing the same sicks repeatedly day after day,” he said. “Socks are kind of like bandages where if you don’t replace them and don’t clean them, they just make the infections worse.”
But new socks are the least donated items at Toronto homeless shelters, according to Baskaran’s outreach work with Health for Homeless, a non-profit he founded with fellow students Nicholas Hamzea and Teerka Baskarah while they were still in high school in 2020.
That’s why Health for Homeless is creating “socks pantries” in Toronto: open access cupboards stationed outside of health centres that are stocked with free individually packaged pairs of socks. Baskaran compares them to Toronto’s community fridges which are located across the city that are stocked with donated fresh food available to those in need.
TThe non-profit, which is also a UofT club, bills itself as a social medicine group, with around 50 volunteers, that focuses on addressing health disparities in the unhoused community. Baskaran said foot infections, as well as frostbite, are the most “underreported and under-recognized” issues the group encounters.
