Patients with this virus create 440 gallons of medical waste daily, including tools, gowns, gloves, body fluids, sheets, mattresses and more. That’s a considerable amount of medical waste in any situation, but it is especially daunting in this situation since it should be disposed of extremely cautiously, to avoid the risk of spreading disease. What do you do with a problem such as Ebola waste? As you don’t need to throw it in the garbage.
Somewhat surprisingly, states Bausch, the United States really faces bigger problems in regards to disposing disposing of Ebola waste, which can be simply burned in massive pits in Africa:”In the USA, of course, we are somewhat beholden to higher tech solutions, which in some ways are a little bit more problematic in terms of treating all that waste, and we want autoclaves or incinerators that could handle that sort of thing. It’s not the true inactivation that is particularly difficult; it is just the process of finding the waste from, of course, the frontline of care and interaction with the patients safely to the place where it could be incinerated or autoclaved.”
The problem in america is ironically compounded by the increased access to medical care, and the high quality of medical services, available. In america, patients are treated by medical teams with access to a huge volume of supplies they use for security, including masks, gowns, booties, and gloves, together with sanitizers and other tools. Moreover, patients receive extensive medical interventions that create waste such as needles, tubing, medical tape, empty IV bags, and more. The very care that has helped a lot of the handful of Ebola patients in america conquer the disease has contributed to the massive amount of waste generated, highlighting a critical hole in U.S. medical infrastructure — while African hospitals might have lacked the staff and supplies needed to supply help to Ebola patients, they’re at least prepared to deal with the waste.
The CDC just issued guidelines to assist clinicians and administrators decide upon how to handle Ebola waste, but The New York Times notes that many facilities don’t have the autoclave, and incinerator, capacity to deal with medical waste with this scale. Some countries prohibit the burning of medical waste altogether, or have barred incineration of Ebola waste, resulting in the transfer of waste across state boundaries to facilities that could handle it, which poses its own dangers; with every mile added to transportation, there’s a greater danger of spreading disease to previously unexposed communities.
Surprisingly, defenders of burning the waste come from surprising corners. Environmentals such as Allen Hershkowitz, National Resources Defense Council senior scientist, point out that:”There is no pollutant that’s going to come from a waste incinerator that is more dangerous than the Ebola virus. When you are dealing with pathogenic and biological hazards, sometimes the safest thing to do is combustion.”
The argument in defense of incineration could be bolstered by the fact that medical waste businesses specialize in high-efficiency incineration with equipment designed to minimize and trap byproducts of combustion, reducing overall pollution considerably. Fears about Ebola, rather than real environmental or public health issues, are driving the decision to push against incineration of ebola waste in several areas, but eventually, the United States is going to have to face facts: The mounting waste that accumulates in facilities where Ebola patients receive treatments needs to be disposed of safely, and promptly.
by: http://www.care2.com/causes/an-unexpected-ebola-infrastructure-problem-waste.html