Whether picking through domestic or trade garbage, or through untreated clinical wastes as we have reported on the Clinical Waste Discussion Forum so many times previously, the risks of infection and injury for waste pickers is exceptionally high.

At the bottom of the pile, literally, they have little hope for better standards of care, and their plight is perhaps fixed. But they are standing up for better conditions and the availability of PPE items (Waste pickers demand equipment, safety gear).

It may not be much, and it may not be the best, but considering their present standards of safety anything is better than nothing. Perhaps this should be the target for some of those recent schemes proposing the collection and shipping of used PPE items for use in resource poor countries?