MEDICAL waste management is an urgent matter that requires immediate attention. Views have been expressed on the matter by concerned experts. But laymen are still puzzled.
Being a health care professional, I am concerned about how to handle medical waste. Safe handling will not only protect the environment. More importantly, it will protect the health of the public at large. As a legislator monitoring the use of public money, I am also aware of the need to choose the most cost-effective means to deal with medical waste without causing unnecessary public fear.
An American epidemiological expert, Professor William Rutala, recently told a Hospital Authority seminar that it was of the utmost importance to give an appropriate definition for medical waste, based on what is dangerous and infectious and what is not.In 1989, four US states participated in a Medical Waste Tracking project. The scheme however gave too wide a definition for medical waste that required special treatment, including sharps (needles, blades, etc), blood and blood products, microbiological organs, tissues, animal carcasses, bedding and communicable disease isolation. Such wide coverage had led medical waste management costs to skyrocket. Based on the tracking project, a New York university hospital recorded a three-fold increase in medical waste generated as compared with that in 1984, and waste management costs rose by nearly seven times.
Professor Rutala said only sharps and microbiological waste required special treatment like incineration. It was safe to handle other hospital garbage in the same way as household waste, for example, in landfills. In Hongkong's public hospitals and clinics, sharps are incinerated at the 23 incinerators attached to various hospitals. For aesthetic reasons, pathological tissue, organs and animal carcasses are also incinerated even if they are not infectious. The hitlist also includes cytotoxic drugs, to avoid anyone from picking them up and taking them. Other medical waste from public hospitals and clinics is wrapped in red plastic bags for collection and disposal by teams from the two municipal councils.
Even so, due to insufficient policing and lack of guidelines, it is not uncommon to see our public medical institutes dumping needles with ordinary rubbish, placing red medical waste bags next to ordinary garbage bags, rupturing bags by dragging or careless packing, or having blood or human tissues poured down drains. Such malpractices must be stopped! Yet, the most thorny problem lies in the private sector. With neither legislation nor guidelines on ways to store, transport and dispose of medical waste,private hospitals, clinics and laboratories are free to do away with this waste any way they want. The Government and health care profession must come up with a set of workable guidelines for all medical institutes, both public and private, to follow.
The Environmental Protection Department has already come up with a solid recommendation to build a $165 million centralised incineration facility for handling all medical waste. Another $5.5 million has been set aside to study the details of the plan.
