Waste security at all points from producer sites though intermediate storage area and transport to the point of final destruction is of obvious importance. In no particular order, protection against exposure to biological agents and hazardous drug and chemical substances, sharps and occasionally radioactive traces as well as issues of confidentiality and aesthetics, smell and nuisance etc are all important.
Often overlooked, since in the UK the problem has largely disappeared, is the prevention of scavaging for drugs of abuse and syringes/needles or for processing and illicit re-use of waste items. This continues to be rife in many parts of the world. However, another security problem now arises …. spies!
Voice of America today has a piece “Spies Track Physical Illnesses of Foreign Leaders” that explains in some detail the approaches taken by US to manage the problem inherent in both democracy or dictatorship, that there may be no secret more closely guarded than the health of the country’s leader. So when world leaders gather for an event like the UN General Assembly, intelligence agencies closely watch presidents and prime ministers for any clues as to their true medical conditions. An ill-timed cough or sudden fever of a president, prime minister, dictator, or monarch can send financial markets into a tailspin, spark a nation to revolution, ignite a succession crisis, or swing an election.
If a leader is kept out of sight, intelligence agencies must especially rely on other routes for information gathering. Fred Burton, vice-president of intelligence for the private strategic risk firm Stratfor, says developing sources to provide intelligence on an official’s medical state is no different than having an agent give the whereabouts of an al-Qaida terrorist or the state of Iran’s nuclear program.
“That could be anything from hospital administrators to nurses to physicians’ assistants to couriers that transmit blood or body fluid for testing. It could be outsourced laboratories. It could be anybody who has capability to access medical records inside of a hospital kind of environment,” Burton said.
Burton says agents will collect medical waste items, which can yield important information about someone’s medical condition.
“No discarded bandage or something like a syringe should be discounted because you can draw DNA and blood types and you can do some examination on the contents of even a discarded band-aid to try to determine perhaps what’s wrong with that person. So, as unseemly as that may sound, this is what intelligence services do,” he said.
Surely, a new aspect to waste security that none of us has previously dreamt of. Watch out for spies!