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Wading Across Infectious Flood Waters
Another reason to take proper medical waste disposal seriously
For a country visited by close to 20 typhoons each year and facing climate-change induced extreme weather patterns amidst urban congestion, clogged sewages, and trash-covered waterways, flooding has become an almost accepted reality during the Philippine monsoon season. And while floods, particularly in poorly planned urban centers, already carry with them potentially hazardous and disease-causing elements, the alarming situation of improperly disposed health care waste in the country injects additional pathogens in flood waters.
Waste haulers as the culprits
Although most public and private health care facilities implement mandated medical waste sorting, segregation, and storage procedures established in the Department of Health (DOH) Health Care Waste Management Manual, reliance or almost dependence on contracted third-party waste haulers to dispose (and treat if necessary) the waste generated by health care activities subvert efforts at the hospital or facility level to minimize the adverse effects of medical waste to ecosystems and the broader public. While third-party waste haulers are regulated by law and government authorities, poor monitoring and surveillance has emboldened waste hauling companies or at least their staff to engage in practices that endanger public health and safety. This includes dumping HCW already sorted or segregated in hospitals in unauthorized areas such as beaches, rivers, or canals.
Dumped in these areas, potentially infectious or hazardous medical waste will naturally flow where the gushing flood waters take them, releasing into the waters in the meantime, toxic substances that can cause various diseases. In instances where waste haulers are not flagrantly derelict, delays in collecting untreated HCW stored in health care facilities is the key problem. While waste storage facilities in hospitals or clinics must also follow established government regulations, there is no preventing them seeping through when the facility itself gets flooded.
Medical waste treatment as a Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) best practice
By itself, untreated medical waste has been documented to transmit various diseases ranging from bacterial, parasitic, to viral infections including Hepatitis B, HIV, meningitis and many others. While no available research directly links medical waste to flood-borne diseases (commonly, leptospirosis and tetanus) or whether flood waters reduce the infectiousness of untreated HCW, it would still be safe to assume the worst possibility for the sake of public safety.
This dimension to HCW makes it not just a health but also a disaster risk reduction issue.
In the Philippines, July is considered National Disaster Resilience Month aside from Nutrition Month. And while the focus of many public authorities has remained calamity response, rescue, and relief, considering medical waste as disaster risk bears considerable merit in the face of piling-up health care waste due to increased medical activities and procedures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Viewing medical waste from this perspective makes a compelling argument for the procurement of necessary technology and equipment that can reduce the risks of medical waste-infected flood waters as a component of effective DRR strategies.
One Top Medical Systems Resources, Inc. – the leading medical waste management solutions in the Philippines – is in partnership with French-German company Tesalys to exclusively distribute in the country the Tesalys line of cutting-edge medical waste autoclaves that provides convenient and cost-effective medical waste treatment solutions to health care facilities.