Kenya: How Toxic and Infectious Medical Waste Can Be Harming Citizens
A visit to the hospital does not usually show what happens in the trunk. It is here where lost blood and body tissues and parts from surgeries, pharmaceuticals, medicine bottles — tonnes of hospital waste — go through. In the instance of the Kenyatta National Hospital, this might be as much as one tonne a day estimated to be half the medical waste generated from town. Quite understandably, it is not usually open to the general public. Most of these normally wind up in incinerators — the most economical medical waste disposal system for the majority of hospitals. But a good deal of it slips through the system to get us stressed. Best practice dictates that such ash be buried. However, as this author found out, this is much better said than done. Lack of adequate equipment to safely dispose of waste and failure to see best practices was a…
An Unusual Ebola Infrastructure Problem: Waste
Patients for this debilitating virus create 440 gallons of medical waste daily, such as instruments, gowns, gloves, body fluids, linens, sheets and more. That is a considerable amount of medical waste in any circumstance, but it is particularly daunting in this situation because it ought to be disposed extremely carefully, to avoid the chance of spreading disease. What should you do with a problem such as Ebola waste? Because you don’t need to toss it in the garbage. Somewhat astonishingly, says Bausch, the United States actually faces bigger problems in regards to safely disposing of Ebola waste, which is simply burned in large pits in Africa:”In the United States, naturally, we’re somewhat beholden to greater tech solutions, which in some ways are a tiny bit more problematic concerning treating all that waste, and we need autoclaves or incinerators that could handle that sort of thing. It’s not the actual inactivation…