A researcher based in the United Kingdom has raised a public health concern about the consumption of ayilo, the bentonite clay widely eaten by pregnant women in Ghana, warning that ongoing laboratory work is detecting potential contamination risks that could harm both mother and unborn child.
Dr. Albert Dayor Piersson, Senior Lecturer at York St John University, shared the concern in an interview on Ghana Television (GTV)’s Breakfast Show, explaining that his research specifically examines environmental exposures during pregnancy, with ayilo identified as one of the key substances under active investigation.
He said preliminary analyses from the work have indicated possible traces of toxic heavy metals and pathogens in clay samples commonly sold and consumed locally. Both categories of contaminants carry documented risks to fetal development. He was careful to note that some results had not yet reached statistical significance due to limited sample size, but argued that biological indicators still pointed to areas of concern serious enough to warrant public attention.
His warning arrives on top of a body of existing peer-reviewed evidence. A 2019 study published in the Pan African Medical Journal, examining clay samples from Anfoega in the Volta Region, found traces of lead, nickel and arsenic alongside pathogenic microorganisms including Escherichia and Klebsiella species. A separate 2020 study in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth confirmed similar toxic metal contamination patterns in clay consumed by pregnant women in the Ho municipality, with researchers concluding that accumulated exposure to those heavy metals could lead to complications in pregnancy.
What Dr. Piersson’s ongoing work adds is a focus on individual biological signals during pregnancy, rather than simply testing clay composition in isolation. That distinction matters because clay consumed in different batches, from different sources and in varying quantities may produce different exposures, and the gap between what is in the clay and what enters the body is precisely what population-level composition studies have struggled to close.
The scale of the practice makes the research gap a genuine public health issue. The Ho municipality study found geophagy prevalence of 48.4% among 217 pregnant women surveyed, with many respondents unaware of documented health risks. The practice is culturally rooted and commercially active, with ayilo sold at major markets including Makola in Accra, typically shaped into baked egg-sized balls.
Antenatal care in Ghana routinely covers nutrition, iron supplementation and screening for common conditions, but the environmental dimension of pregnancy health remains less systematically addressed. What pregnant women consume outside formal medical products, and how those substances interact with fetal development, is an area where research data is still thin.
Dr. Piersson called for large scale studies to properly map the long term effects of ayilo consumption on pregnancy outcomes, a signal that current evidence, while pointing clearly toward caution, has not yet reached the threshold needed to anchor firm clinical guidance.
