The Norovirus season will be upon us soon, and though much of the waste – mainly vomit bowls and the like – will go into the washer macerator, a great deal of highly infectious wet waste will be bagged for disposal.
This is infectious waste by any reasonable classification, though idiotic at the Environment Agency might pretend otherwise in order to protect their nominal waste classifications that owe more to blind ideology, and possibly to a not-so-blind leaning toward favoritism.
A single much publicised publication sought to propose that just about all clinical wastes were of only minimal risk of infection since a limited range of ‘hospital pathogens’ had not been found in a small number of samples. Of course, that is not proof and it would be action of a fool to believe that this study proves anything of the sort.
Even more recently, researchers from Emory University have discovered that Norovirus in groundwater can remain infectious for at least 61 days. The research is published in the October issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Human Norovirus is the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis. The
disease it causes tends to be one of the more unpleasant of those that leave healthy people unscathed in the long run, with diarrhea and vomiting that typically last for 48 hours. Norovirus sickens 1 in 15 Americans annually, causing 70,000 hospitalizations, and more than 500 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
That this troublesome pathogen can survive in groundwater for so long suggests that without doubt bagged waste will remain infective as it passes along the disposal chain. Leakage is not unknown, and waste handlers have been recorded to develop Norovirus infection having uplifted waste sacks from nursing homes and lifted them into the back of a truck!
Norovirus is a nasty little beast. Vomitus and diarrhoea can contain huge numbers of virus particles and the infectivity is high – just a few virus particles and that’s it!
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does anyone have an audit tool to use when auditing waste contractors – to help complete the audit cycle and demonstrate our legal duties to check the contractors? thanks, Suzi
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Suzi
There are several, mostly in checklist format, but all of those I am aware of including my own are proprietary. What you will expect is an audit service, rather than an audit checklist that you can apply yourself.
Some NHS groups may have developed their own and be prepared to share them, at least with other NHS groups, but beyond that I think you must decide between a DIY approach and a paid for consultancy service. If you have the opportunity to obtain a form from someone else, however simple that may be, would you know what to look for and how to measure good practice fom bad? It might be fun to look inside vans and visit a waste treatment facility but what will that achieve?
If the honest answer to teh question is no, then the exercise becomes entirely futile. You will not have fulfilled your obligations but will have wasted lots of time and money.