In a bizarre protest, local activists continue to voice their objections at area hospitals over the practice of trucking infectious medical waste through local communities to be treated at a remote facility. As Safe Hospitals Safe Communities spokesperson Debra Pelletier notes, “We are visiting area hospitals to raise awareness about the transportation of medical waste through local communities and ask for safer disposal of medical waste. Nearly 1,000 hospitals now use on-site sterilization technologies that prevent infectious medical waste from being trucked through our neighborhoods, thus stopping the spread of infectious pathogens and preventing possible accidents and spills.”
http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2013/01/activists-demonstrate-for-safe-disposal-of-medical-waste.aspx
Thinking this through, the campaigners don’t want trucks carrying “potentially harmful” clinical wastes driving through their communities. It is dangerous, and they might be harmed? Instead, they demand local, on-site, treatments ignoring the potential impact of those clinical wastes on the hospital patients who are at presumably higher risk!
It simply doesn’t add up.
If it is too hazardous to truck these wastes through the town, then surely patients inside the hospital must be dropping like flies, ravaged by the death and disease emanating from their own waste. But that isn’t the case, it it? Some common sense is required, to comprehend the circumstances of risk, that increases for those coming into contact with the wastes and from any escape, predominantly as run-off of inadequately packaged wet waste. Just being in proximity to it is of no risk at all, and thus the complaints are entirely misguided.
The pressure group Safe Hospitals Safe Communities may have a case in some of their campaigning, but to rail against these clinical wastes being driven through the town for safe off-site treatment suggests that they expect predict particular hazard just by standing close to this stuff. So, they say, keep it at the hospital and treat it on-site. Doesn’t that place the hospital patients at risk of whatever it is they perceive as the fundamental hazard against which they complain so bitterly? And if it doesn’t, how do they square that against their desire for ‘Safe Hospitals’ as well as ‘Safe Communities’?
You can’t have it both ways!
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And so it rolls on with a presumably heartfelt letter to the local paper, The Miami Herald, which claims that “…infectious medical waste leaves our community hospitals on a daily basis. Toxic medical waste is allowed on our streets and highways to be driven to remote locations and treated there. When they send their bio-waste through our neighborhoods, they take the chance that an accident could occur spilling and contaminating our streets.”
Well, what about those poor patients in the hospital, exposed to this toxic and infectious waste that is generated by their own treatments? Hospitals ARE dangerous places with drug errors and medical mistakes, substandard nursing, and hospital-acquired infections. But in general, that red (or yellow or orange) sack in the corner of the room, and that sharps bin, is generally benign toward those who are not required to handled them.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/01/29/3207094/medical-waste-could-put-us-at.html#storylink=cpy